Mockery



Mockery or mocking is the act of insulting or making light of a person or other thing, sometimes merely by taunting, but often by making a caricature, purporting to engage in imitation in a way that highlights unflattering characteristics. Mockery can be done in a lighthearted and gentle way, but can also be cruel and hateful. Mockery appears to be unique to humans, and serves a number of psychological functions, such as reducing the perceived imbalance of power between authority figures and common people. Examples of mockery can be found in literature and the arts.

Quotes

 * Fielding Mellish: I object, Your Honor! This trial is a travesty! It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham!
 * Woody Allen, Bananas (1971).


 * Freedom means that you have the right to do a certain thing; but if you have no opportunity to do it, that right is sheer mockery.
 * Alexander Berkman, What Is Communist Anarchism? (1929), Chapter 14: "The February Revolution".


 * Though I were gifted with an angel's tongue, And voice like that with which the prophets sung, Yet if mild charity were not within, 'T were all an impious mockery and sin.
 * Lucretia Maria Davidson, Charity (c. 1825).


 * A delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
 * Thomas Denman, 1st Baron Denman, O'Connell v. The Queen (1841), 11 Clark and Finnelly Reports.


 * And bear about the mockery of woe To midnight dances and the public show.
 * Alexander Pope, To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, line 57.


 * It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system; thought and mockery here and now are required to prevent the mechanists from building another.
 * Dora Russell, The Right to Be Happy (1927), preface.


 * Misery makes sport to mock itself.
 * William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act II, scene 1, line 85.


 * O that I were a mockery king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, To melt myself away in water drops!
 * William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act IV, scene 1, line 260.


 * Perséverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery.
 * William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (1623), Ulysses, scene iii.


 * The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery.
 * Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Suicide Club", New Arabian Nights (1882).