Meanness Quotes - Page 7

• At my age I can handle people writing junk about me on social media, but I sometimes air "mean tweets" on my show to highlight how destructive this meanness and bullying is to young people. I know how devastating it is for a young person to be the victim of such ugliness.

  Gretchen Carlson

  Bullying, Writing, Mean

  Source: frankviola.org

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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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• 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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• 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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• All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.

  George Saunders

  Sake, Tradition

  "George Saunders on Trump, Mystery, and Why He Rejects Social Media". Interview with Catherine Woodiwiss, sojo.net. August 30, 2016.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ... 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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• 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 are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for theother fellow to make the first move--and he, in turn, waits for you. The minute a person whose word means a great deal dares to take the open- hearted and courageous way, many others follow. Not everyone can be turned aside from meanness and hatred, but the great majority of Americans is heading in that direction. I have a great belief in the future of my people and my country.

  Marian Anderson

  Country, Moving, Heart

  Marian Anderson (1956). “My Lord, what a Morning: An Autobiography”, p.312, University of Illinois Press

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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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• Jesus reminds us that prayer is a little like children coming to their parents. Our children come to us with the craziest requests at times! Often we are grieved by the meanness and selfishness in their requests, but we would be all the more grieved if they never came to us even with their meanness and selfishness. We are simply glad that they do come--mixed motives and all.

  Richard J. Foster

  Jesus, Prayer, Children

  Richard J. Foster (2009). “Prayer - 10th Anniversary Edition: Finding the Heart's True Home”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.

  Theodor Mommsen

  Mean, Evil, Simplicity

  "The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2" by Theodor Mommsen, translated by W.P.Dickson, 1866.

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• Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

  Bruce Catton

  War, Moving, Greatness

  Bruce Catton, James M. McPherson (1960). “The Civil War”, p.275, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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