Weekend Words: Bully
Is Donald Trump a bully? It depends on who you ask.
Is Donald Trump a bully? It depends on who you ask.
Rosalind Wiseman, author of the book Queen Bees and Wannabes (2009), told The Daily Beast that “He’s absolutely operating as an intelligent, manipulative bully who truly does not care about the consequences of his actions,” and John Fund, writing in the National Review, compared him to “Douglas C. Neidermeyer, the bullying ROTC student leader in the 1978 classic college film Animal House.”
But Dewey Cornell, a forensic psychologist and bullying expert at the University of Virginia, told USA Today that ”Bullying is the repeated, intentional harm of another person who has less power than you do. If it’s him and Rosie O’Donnell going at each other, they may have comparable power.”
The king’s a bawcock, and a heart of gold,
A lad of life, an imp of fame,
Of parents good, of fist most valiant:
I kiss his dirty shoe, and from my heart-string
I love the lovely bully.
—Shakespeare, Henry V
Government of the busy by the bossy for the bully.
—Arthur Selden, Capitalism
The “proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought: every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon: no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honor and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
—Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
Fighting means you could lose. Bullying means you can’t. A bully wants to beat somebody; he doesn’t want to fight somebody.
—Andrew Vachss
Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.
—Benjamin Disraeli
[Prizefighter Sonny] Liston is like most big bullies, if you can stay away and make him miss for a few rounds he’ll get frustrated. Once you strip away that feeling of invincibility, he can be had.
—Rocky Marciano
There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.
—Lady Gaga
One of the great attractions of patriotism — it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
—Aldous Huxley
It doesn’t prove anything except that you’re bullying us. Which, as I recall, is a sign of cowardice.
—Veronica Roth, Divergent
I don’t believe in anarchy, because it will ultimately amount to the power of the bully, with weapons. Gandhi is my life’s inspiration: passive resistance. I don’t want to live in the Thunderdome with Mad Max.
—John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, co-writer of the Sex Pistols’
“Anarchy in the U.K.”)
“Go ahead, bully me; but in 30 years, the only thing people will remember is that I am your boss.”
― J.E. Allotey
