"My hatred is a thousand times more powerful than all your good intentions"
About this Quote
Hatred, here, isn’t being confessed so much as weaponized: a dare to the reader’s favorite self-image as basically decent. Jim Goad’s line is built like a sucker punch, turning “good intentions” into a punchline and “my hatred” into a kind of raw, credible fuel. The bragging math - “a thousand times” - is deliberately crude, not because it’s precise, but because it mimics the way anger feels: totalizing, exponential, immune to polite calibration.
The specific intent is provocation with an argument hidden inside it. Goad is attacking the modern faith that moral posture counts as moral action. “Good intentions” evokes the soft currency of liberal civility, the well-meaning sentiment that expects to be treated as a virtue in itself. By claiming hatred’s superior power, he’s not necessarily endorsing hatred as ethically right; he’s asserting it as socially effective. Hate organizes. It recruits. It sustains attention. It moves bodies through doors. Intentions, by contrast, often stop at the level of self-congratulation.
The subtext is contempt for the therapeutic culture of niceness: if you think your decency is enough, you’re not just naive, you’re losing. There’s also a perverse honesty to it, the kind that refuses the usual disclaimers and makes the reader confront an uncomfortable reality about politics, media, and grievance: the loudest emotions tend to set the agenda.
Context matters because Goad’s work trades in taboo, antagonism, and the posture of the gleeful heretic. The line functions as a manifesto for that sensibility, elevating hostility into a principle - not to persuade, but to dominate the room.
The specific intent is provocation with an argument hidden inside it. Goad is attacking the modern faith that moral posture counts as moral action. “Good intentions” evokes the soft currency of liberal civility, the well-meaning sentiment that expects to be treated as a virtue in itself. By claiming hatred’s superior power, he’s not necessarily endorsing hatred as ethically right; he’s asserting it as socially effective. Hate organizes. It recruits. It sustains attention. It moves bodies through doors. Intentions, by contrast, often stop at the level of self-congratulation.
The subtext is contempt for the therapeutic culture of niceness: if you think your decency is enough, you’re not just naive, you’re losing. There’s also a perverse honesty to it, the kind that refuses the usual disclaimers and makes the reader confront an uncomfortable reality about politics, media, and grievance: the loudest emotions tend to set the agenda.
Context matters because Goad’s work trades in taboo, antagonism, and the posture of the gleeful heretic. The line functions as a manifesto for that sensibility, elevating hostility into a principle - not to persuade, but to dominate the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
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