Quotes About Schadenfreude

“Schadenfreude is as old as the Scriptures. Believe me, when the girls in the Red Sea bowling league heard that Lot's wife had morphed into a pillar of salt, the deer-lick jokes flew.”

— Dennis Miller

“Schadenfreude is so nutritious.”

— Will Self

“No small amount of schadenfreude. Do you know what that means?"
"Dad, it's the lifeline of gossip. Of course I know what it means.”

— Cristina García

“He remembered the Professor's advice to his eager employees during his first year: With us, feelings are described through images, and in the world of television, there are only seven feelings: well-being, Schadenfreude, sentimentality, shock, outrage, disgust, and anger. Nothing else.”

— Erik Valeur

“Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude
the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.”

— Christopher Moore

“It wasn't like the news delighted her, nothing like. But I saw her get a tiny tickle in the schadenfreude as she registered that this happened on Dad's watch.”

— Joshilyn Jackson

“The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.”

— Martin Amis

“To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

“Humor is just Schadenfreude with a clear conscience”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“My younger sister's a comedian. She has a sketch comedy group in Chicago called Schadenfreude and I look at her with such admiration and envy because it's such an amazing thing to make someone laugh.”

— Brian D'Arcy James

“The NSA is looking for terrorists. They're not getting psychosexual pleasure out of their schadenfreude about you.-”

— Jon Ronson

“At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like to witness actual suffering, before-your-very-eyes humiliation.”

— Julia Glass

“I'll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I'm also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It's one of the few checks and balances in the market.”

— James Chanos

“I often find myself worrying about celebrities. It's an entirely caring thing; it's not like the people who commission those photographs with cruel arrows to go on the covers of the celebrity magazines. The photographs show botched plastic surgery, raging eczema, weight gain and horrible clothes for maximum schadenfreude.”

— Peter York

“If you look up schadenfreude on Wikipedia, you'll see a picture of me with a snide smile on my face.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“Since Madonna is positioned as always 'cooler than thou,' we all are primed for schadenfreude if something in her fabulous life goes amiss.”

— Naomi Wolf

“The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable: its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.”

— Noam Chomsky

“When failing spectacularly the trick is to employ an inverted Schadenfreude. Take ownership of your misfortune.”

— Dean Cavanagh

“She became a morality tale stiff with Schadenfreude, and so many columnists made allusion to Icarus that Private Eye ran a special column.”

— Robert Galbraith

“At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.”

— David Berlinski

“Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.”

— Eric Hoffer