Sinister Latin Quotes

Sinister is Latin for 'left', making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education.

Christ,” Philip said after a while. “Latin imperatives in bed. I had no idea. Well, now we know why the Roman empire declined and fell.” “They were declining the wrong verbs.

Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers.

As I inspected the engravings for sale, I noticed a very fine classical scene within which was written, FERREA VIRGA EST, UMBRATILIS MOTUS. Recognizing the Latin motto from the sundial at Delafosse, I asked the proprietor if he knew the meaning. "'The rod is of iron, the motion of shadow,'" he told me obligingly. "Thank you," I said with a smile , and returned to the engraving. It was a memento mori, an Italian scene in which the sundial was reminiscent of a tomb. On one side, a pair of young lovers basked idly in sunshine, while on the other they slept in sinister shadow. An ugly representation of Death approached them from behind the ornate tomb. They do not see what pursues them, I mused.

Now, in Scribner's window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book. I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: "Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur." The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside -- to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin -- a difficult, ancient and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition. That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson's book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear. Now, in light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. The result was that I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith. And that last thing was the most important of all.

Like any of man’s inventions, artificial intelligence can be used for good or evil. In the right hands and with proper intent, it can do beneficial things for humanity. Conversely, it can be used by evil dictators, sinister politicians, and malevolent leaders to create something as dangerous as a deadly weapon in a terrorist’s hands. Yuval Noah Harari is a leading spokesperson for the globalists and their transhumanist, AI, and Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda. Harari is also an advisor to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. Barack Obama refers to Harari as a prophet and recommends his books. Harari wrote a book titled Sapiens and another titled Homo Deus (“homo” being a Latin word for human or man, and “deus” being the Latin word for god or deity). He believes that homo sapiens as we know them have run their course and will no longer be relevant in the future. Technology will create homo deus, which will be a much superior model with upgraded physical and mental abilities. Harari tells us that humankind possesses enormous new powers, and once the threat of famine, plagues, and war is finally lifted, we will be looking for something to do with ourselves. He believes the next targets of our power and technology are likely to be immortality, happiness, and divinity. He says: “We will aim to overcome old age and even death itself. Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn homo sapiens into homo deus. When I say that humans will upgrade themselves into gods in the 21st century, this is not meant as a metaphor; I mean it literally. If you think about the gods of ancient mythology, like the Hebrew God, they have certain qualities. Not just immortality, but maybe above all, the ability to create life, to design life. We are in the process of acquiring these divine abilities. We want to learn how to engineer and produce life. It’s very likely that in the 21st century, the main products of the economy will no longer be textiles and vehicles and weapons. They will be bodies and brains and minds.48

The family who prays together, stays together,” they taught. The Prashaws also fought when we prayed. We learned our catechism at Catholic schools. The stories of saints inspired us. St. Francis, a lover of the poor and animals, was an early favourite of mine. A nun might whack the back of our heads when we slouched while kneeling. Marty endured a rap on the knuckles for writing with his left hand. Lefties were deemed “children of the devil;” in classical Latin, the word left is “sinister.” Still, all in all, it was not a bad thing to be taught one’s life had meaning, a purpose. Being good mattered. Life was about treating one another well.

To my mind, there is something warmer and more human about the carnality of other dictatorships, say in Latin America. One can more easily understand a desire for cases stuffed with money and drugs, for women and weapons and blood. These obedient grey men doing it with their underpaid informers on a weekly basis seem at once more stupid and more sinister. Betrayal clearly has its own reward: the small deep human satisfaction of having one up on someone else. It is the psychology of the mistress, and this regime used it as fuel.

Sic Semper Reichsfeinde.” A sinister Nazi paraphrasal of the old Roman reproach in Latin; thus always to tyrants. How sinister the world now; 'Thus Always to Enemies of the Reich.

Latin, the name Lucifer means “bearer of light,” which was in reference to the planet Venus. Venus was also called the “morning star” because it is very bright in the sky and can be observed with the naked eye in the morning before sunrise.

Occult’ may perhaps sound somewhat sinister in the ears of some modern readers, but its original meaning is not connected to black magic or any other evil; the word is derived from the Latin occultus, meaning ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’, and is a neutral term for phenomena that are obscure to us. For example, Isaac Newton, who first formulated the law of gravitation, describes gravity as having ‘occult’ qualities, as it cannot be seen and it exerts its power at a distance and in a secret way.

Travel is torture. At least if we stick with the etymology of the word. Linguists tend to agree that the term comes from “travail” (“work” in French) or “travailen” (“torment” in Middle English). Not very tempting, is it? Well, wait for the worst part: these two words probably share an even more sinister meaning: according to author and journalist Simon Winchester, in fact, they very likely derive from the Latin term “tripalium”, an ancient torture instrument used in the Roman Empire. Today, when we think about travel, we picture fast trains, intercontinental flights in business class, sandy beaches, and Mojitos, but things were not always as smooth. Travelling was extremely difficult (and risky) in ancient times and organizing one’s travel was, indeed, a torture.

However ironic or sinister, multipolarity is now the basis for a whole campaign, systematically spread on RT in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, repeated by information-laundering sites such as Yala News, stated again and again by a thousand other cutouts, think tanks, and paid and unpaid pro-Russian journalists, as well as other spokesmen for Autocracy, Inc. Xinhua celebrated the African Union’s membership in the G20—the Group of 20 conference of the world’s largest economies—as evidence of “the aggressive emergence of the multipolar world.”16 The China Global Television Network, in a web article illustrated with a photograph of the Syrian dictator, Bashir al-Assad—who massacres his own people—informs its viewers that “China’s diplomacy injects vitality into the multipolar world.”17 President Maduro of Venezuela has spoken of “the multipolar, pluricentric world that we yearn for, and that we are united for, with our flags of struggle with all of the peoples of the world.”18 When he visited China, he tweeted that his trip would “strengthen ties of cooperation and the construction of a new global geopolitics.”19 North Korea has expressed its desire to cooperate with Russia “to establish a ‘new multi-polarized international order.’”20 When the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, in 2023 visited the three most important Latin American autocracies, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, he said that the purpose of his trip was to “stand against imperialism and unilateralism,”21 by which he meant he wanted to solidify their opposition to democracy and universal rights. Slowly, the countries leading the assault on the language of rights, human dignity, and the rule of law are creating institutions of their own. Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia have observer status)—all agree to recognize one another’s “sovereignty,” not to criticize one another’s autocratic behavior, and not to intervene in one another’s internal politics. The group of countries known as BRICS (the acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and was originally a term coined by a Goldman Sachs economist to describe emerging-market business opportunities) is also transforming itself into an alternative international institution, with regular meetings and new members.