Meanness Quotes - Page 5

• The threat posed by Bank of America isn't just financial - it's a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?

  Matt Taibbi

  Dream, Winning, Play

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• You think the end justifies the means, however vile. I tell you: the end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is tomorrow's life. Great ends cannot be attained by base means. You've proved that in all your social upheavals. The meanness and inhumanity of the means make you mean and inhuman and make the end unattainable.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Mean, Thinking, Upheaval

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• Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindnesses linger there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.

  James M. Barrie

  Girl, Sweet, Kindness

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• What often seemed like meanness or coldness was really fear of emotions and intimacy.

  Bob Colacello

  Emotion, Intimacy, Coldness

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Strangely, meanness pays more than offering constructive and interesting commentary. Every season I think, "This is the last season. I'm not gonna read tomorrow morning. Forget it." The first thing when I wake up - quite late, usually - I am craving the newspaper.

  Nicolas Ghesquiere

  Morning, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Sorrow, Care, Tasks

  Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Janet Todd (1989). “The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft”, NYU Press

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• The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Class, Clothes, House

  D. H. Lawrence (2017). “Phoenix: the Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence by D. H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.138, Delphi Classics (Parts Edition) via PublishDrive

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• It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Personality, Enemy

  "The Man Who Was Thursday". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Ch. VI : The Exposure, 1908.

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• We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.

  William J. Clinton

  America, President, Firsts

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

  Graham Greene

  Knowing, People, Heaven

  'The Heart of the Matter' (1948) bk. 1, pt. 1, ch. 5

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• Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love, Confusion, Forgiving

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.350, Modern Library

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• Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Work, Character, Foolish

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1316, Delphi Classics

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• White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beautiful, Character, Lakes

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience: Top American Literary”, p.124, 谷月社

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• Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of low and base minds. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness; a mark which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate. It is consistent neither with learning nor true civility.

  William Jones

  Ignorance, Animal, Dumb

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• It is contended that those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of those schools is high-toned and manly; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are encouraged: that an unwritten code of honor deals to the spoiled child of rank, and to the child of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to make them gentlemen.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, Children, School

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.567, Modern Library

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• You've got to know what your 'thing' is, and you've got to call it a 'thing,' whether it's meanness, nastiness, un-forgiveness, arrogance, ego, resistance, rebelliousness or defiance. Everybody's got a 'thing,' and once you call your 'thing' a 'thing,' we can give it a place to be or dismiss it.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Giving, Ego, Arrogance

  Interview with Regina R. Robertson, www.essence.com. September 14, 2012.

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• There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that it is hardly worth while to be here at all.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Going Out, World, Trouble

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• There are some things I am afraid of: I am afraid to do a mean thing.

  James A. Garfield

  Mean

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• A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Art, Gentleman, Ease

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• If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Men, Office, Profound

  Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers marquis de Vauvenargues (1903). “La Bruyère and Vauvenargues: Selections from the Characters, Reflexions and Maxims”

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• In interviews, the first question I get in America is always: 'What do you do to stay young?' I do nothing. I don't think aging is a problem ... I'm so surprised that the emphasis on aging here is on physical decay, when aging brings such incredible freedom. Now what I want most is laughs. I don't want to hurt anybody by laughing -- there is no meanness to it. I just want to laugh.

  Isabella Rossellini

  Hurt, Thinking, America

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• Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.

  Elizabeth Bear

  Frustration, Able, Lifetime

  Elizabeth Bear (2006). “The Chains That You Refuse”, Nightshade Book

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• I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature.

  Laurence Sterne

  Vices, Dishonesty, Murder

  Laurence Sterne (1805). “The Works of Laurence Sterne, A. M.: A sentimental journey through France and Italy. The Koran: or, The life, character and sentiments of Tria Juncta in Uno. A political romance”, p.331

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• Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature.

  Jeremy Collier

  Sight, Envy, Wish

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• I trust in due time to lay the perfidy, meanness, and wickedness of [Henry] Clay naked before the American people. I have lately got an intimation of some of his secret movements, which, if I can reach with positive and responsible proof, I will wield to his political, and perhaps his actual, destruction.

  Andrew Jackson

  People, Political, Secret

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