Meanness Quotes - Page 2

• My mother says that when Mrs. Rowley is mean, which is generally the case, it is really because she is just unhappy, and who could blame her with a husband like that . . . She says this is really the only reason people are ever mean--they have something hurting inside of them, a claw of unhappiness scratching at their hearts, and it hurts them so much that sometimes they have to push it right out of their mouths to scratch someone else, just to give themselves a rest, a moment of relief.

  Laura Moriarty

  Mother, Hurt, Husband

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• Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

  Rebecca Stead

  Mean, Dark, Light

  Rebecca Stead (2010). “When You Reach Me/First Light”, p.160, Wendy Lamb Books

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• Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.

  Edmund Burke

  Ambition, Vanity, Sin

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• I've met little meanness, wherever I went.

  Reynolds Price

  Littles, Mets

  Reynolds Price (1991). “Foreseeable Future”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

  Florence Nightingale

  Selfish, War, Nursing

  Florence Nightingale (2001). “The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale”

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• Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Life, Success, Beauty

  Major Barbara (1907) preface

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• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Positive, Thinking, People

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.12, Penguin

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• The myth of hell represents all the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Revenge, Heart, Men

  85 Copy quote

• Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

  Karl Kraus

  Marriage, Society, Literature

  Thomas Stephen Szasz, Karl Kraus (1990). “Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry”, p.152, Syracuse University Press

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• Being popular is the most important thing in the world!

  Homer

  Family, Money, World And Love

  27 Copy quote

• When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top.

  Todd Solondz

  Real, People, Want

  Interview with Sigrid Nunez, www.believermag.com. February 2005.

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• Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.

  Rebecca Stead

  Mean, Sometimes, Moments

  Rebecca Stead (2010). “When You Reach Me/First Light”, p.160, Wendy Lamb Books

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• The high-spirited man may indeed die, but he will not stoop to meanness. Fire, though it may be quenched, will not become cool.

  Ovid

  Men, Fire, May

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• There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Party, Political, Politics

  Benjamin Disraeli (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Benjamin Disraeli (Illustrated)”, p.159, Delphi Classics

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• Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Wise, Employment, Politics

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• I think [forgiveness] may be the greatest virtue on earth, and certainly the most needed. There is so much of meanness and abuse, of intolerance and hatred. There is so great a need for repentance and forgiveness. It is the great principle emphasized in all of scripture, both ancient and modern. Somehow forgiveness, with love and tolerance, accomplishes miracles that can happen in no other way.

  Gordon B. Hinckley

  Thinking, Repentance And Forgiveness, Hatred

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• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Greatness, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.263, Library of America

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• Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.

  Irving Layton

  Self, Madness, Misanthrope

  Irving Layton (1969). “The whole bloody bird: obs, aphs & pomes”

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• I have great hope of a wicked man, slender hope of a mean one. A wicked man may be converted and become a prominent saint. A mean man ought to be converted six or seven times, one right after the other, to give him a fair start and put him on an equality with a bold, wicked man.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Mean, Men, Giving

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• Undoubtedly ... there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. What bears affinity to cunning is despicable.

  Jane Austen

  Art, Bears, Sometimes

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• Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Meaningful, Spiritual, Pain

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• With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

  Bertrand Russell

  Agriculture, Long, Machines

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.57, W. W. Norton & Company

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• False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Greatness, Political, Politics

  "Of Personal Merit". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally--that's the worst, I think, deficient morals. (Saving Fish From Drowning)

  Amy Tan

  Thinking, People, Mind

  Amy Tan (2012). “Saving Fish From Drowning”, p.15, HarperCollins UK

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• I guess there's just a meanness in this world

  Bruce Springsteen

  World, This World

  Song: Nebraska, Album: Nebraska, 1982

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