Meanness Quotes - Page 7

• Meanness is the one thing I do get upset about on those rare occasions when I see it.

  Maya Soetoro-Ng

  Upset, Rare Occasion, Occasions

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• I don't let negative attitudes and meanness from other people keep me from living my life.

  Ruby Gettinger

  Attitude, People, Negative

  "Interview: Ruby Gettinger from Ruby". Interview with Emma Loggins, www.fanbolt.com. November 14, 2008.

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• This is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security.

  William Shakespeare

  Time, Money, Economics

  William Shakespeare, Mr. Theobald (Lewis) (1772). “The Works of Shakespeare in Twelve Volumes: Collated with the Oldest Copies and Corrected: with Notes Explanatory and Critical”, p.41

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• My theory of self-made men is, then, simply this; that they are men of work. Whether or not such men have acquired material, moral or intellectual excellence, honest labor faithfully, steadily and persistently pursued, is the best, if not the only, explanation of their success... All human experience proves over and over again, that any success which comes through meanness, trickery, fraud and dishonour, is but emptiness and will only be a torment to its possessor.

  Frederick Douglass

  Men, Self, Intellectual

  Frederick Douglass (2016). “The Essential Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches”, p.344, Hackett Publishing

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• Scientists are entitled to be proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call 'theirs' except the things they have done or thought of first? People who criticize scientists for wanting to enjoy the satisfaction of intellectual ownership are confusing possessiveness with pride of possession. Meanness, secretiveness and, sharp practice are as much despised by scientists as by other decent people in the world of ordinary everyday affairs; nor, in my experience, is generosity less common among them, or less highly esteemed.

  Peter Medawar

  Pride, Practice, People

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• To me, every dirty act was simply a sacrament of sin, a passionately religious protest against Christianity, which was for me the symbol of all vileness, meanness, treachery, falsehood and oppression.

  Aleister Crowley

  Religious, Dirty, Sin

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• If we weren't born with anti-social passions - narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious - why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?

  Dennis Prager

  Religious, Passion, Law

  Dennis Prager (2016). “A Dark Time in America”, p.8, Creators Publishing

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• My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.

  James Joyce

  Country, Writing, Men

  "A brief survey of the short story part 32: James Joyce" by Chris Power, www.theguardian.com. March 9, 2011.

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• There`s some nastiness, there`s some meanness there. There`s something going on in the mosques and other places.

  Donald Trump

  Nastiness, Mosques

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.

  Paula Fox

  Dog, Mirrors, Done

  "News from the World: Stories and Essays". Book by Paula Fox, 2011.

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• Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Character, Men, Flesh And Blood

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Walden”, p.159, Xist Publishing

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• Qualities not regulated run into their opposites. Economy before competence is meanness after it. Therefore economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Running, Opposites, Quality

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• Frugality and economy are virtues without which no household can prosper. Whatever the income, waste of all kinds should be most sternly repressed ... Economy and frugality must never, however, be allowed to degenerate into meanness.

  Isabella Beeton

  Income, Waste, Degenerates

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• About the meanest thing you can say about a man is that he means well.

  Harry S. Truman

  Mean, Men, Wells

  Harry S. Truman (1995). “The Wit & Wisdom of Harry Truman: A Treasury of Quotations, Anecdotes, and Observations”, Gramercy

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• But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Self, Hobbies, Peculiar

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.47

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• Waste begets self-will; thrift begets meanness: but better be mean than self-willed.

  Confucius

  Mean, Self, Waste

  Confucius (1909). “The Sayings of Confucius”

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• No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Song, Kings, Hatred

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.4

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• Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Power, Giving, Exaltation

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.23

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• There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.

  William Hazlitt

  Thinking, Talking, Proof

  William Hazlitt (1859). “Table talk”

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• ... I feel certain that his tale is true. Feeling that certainty, I befriend him. As long as that certainty shall last, I will befriend him. And if any consideration could shake me in this resolve, I should be so ashamed of myself for my meanness, that no man's good opinion - no, nor no woman's - so gained, could compensate me for the loss of my own.

  Charles Dickens

  Loss, Men, Long

  Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Edwin Drood and Miscellaneous”, p.173, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Art, People, Generosity

  Marvin Mudrick (1981). “Nobody Here But Us Chickens”

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• But if there has been on this earth no real, perfect human life, no love that never cooled, no faith that never failed, which may shine as a loadstar across the darkness of our experience, a light to light amidst all convictions of our own meanness and all suspicions of other's littleness, why, we may have a religion, but we have not a Christianity. For if we lose Him as a Brother, we cannot feel Him as a Saviour.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Brother, Real, Light

  Frederick William Robertson (1873). “Sermons Preached at Brighton”, p.318

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• An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings?

  Samuel Johnson

  Animal, Men, Shame

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• The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Real, Rare Events, Tragedy

  Stephen Jay Gould (1993). “Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history”, Vintage

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• The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Equality, Differences, Smallest

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