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Mean Quotes

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Mean Quotes

“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”

MeanIndividualNationsSportsWonderEnglandTrainWesternTinyToysPassengersInsufficientIndignantLocomotives
Book:The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902
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“No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.”

PeopleMayMeanPersonsTwoEndsGrowsMoralSecurityExpressionPrideGoes OnHabitTasteNobleLove Each Other
Book:The Best of Willa Cather
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“From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences the experiences of sense.”

MeanDoeArtRealityDealsClassStudyExampleAspectPsychologicalInternalsConventionsTotality
Book:Collected Works: Do what you will
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“Tormented by conflicting feelings, I appealed to reason ; and it is reason which, amid so many dogmatic contradictions, now forces the hypothesis upon me. A priori dogmatism, applying itself to God, has proved fruitless: who knows whither the hypothesis, in its turn, will lead us? I will explain therefore how, studying in the silence of my heart, and far from every human consideration, the mystery of social revolutions, God, the great unknown, has become for me an hypothesis, I mean a necessary dialectical tool.”

KnowsHumansHeartMeanReasonFeelingsTurnsForceSocialSilenceStudyMysteryRevolutionMy HeartToolsContradictionConsiderationHypothesisDogmaticDogmatismSocial RevolutionGreat Unknown
Book:System of Economical Contradictions: Or, The Philosophy of Misery
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“Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God's handiwork. If God bade man annihilate the passions he has given him, God would bid him be and not be; He would contradict himself. He has never given such a foolish commandment, there is nothing like it written on the heart of man, and what God will have a man do, He does not leave to the words of another man. He speaks Himself; His words are written in the secret heart.”

IfsMenTryingHeartMeanDoeSelfWould BePassionSpeakGivenSecretWrittenOvercomingFoolishGods WillAbsurdChiefsUselessCommandmentsPreservationAnother ManSelf PreservationHandiwork
Book:Emile: Or, On Education
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“When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.”

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Author:Fran Lebowitz
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“The theater itself is so archaic and old fashioned, that it doesn't really matter to me whether it's on Avenue D or at the Helen Hayes Theater. What's the difference? It's still a very nostalgic form. Also, it means you're knowingly walking into a room where there's actors. I feel it's very embarrassing. Because, you know, they're right there. You always think like, they can see you, and I think it's mortifying, frankly, and I hate to sit near the front, where you feel they actually might see you. It's too ... it's too live.”

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Author:Fran Lebowitz
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“But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.”

MeanMadeFactsIndividualSocialSidesQualityClassProgressTaughtDegreesCapacityOrganizationOriginalsDemocraticPlatoTaught UsVariablesSuperficialityPlato SSocial OrganizationUtilization
Book:Democracy And Education
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“To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work. It can be accomplished only piecemeal, a step at a time.”

MeanEndsUseSocialResponsibilityAcceptingStepsConditionsExerciseActivityConnectionsUltimateIntelligentStriveFinalsSupposed To BeAccomplishedWorking ItEfficiencyAccumulationDrillsPerpetuatingSocial ConditionsReorganization
Book:Democracy And Education
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“Bravery is a mean state concerned with things that inspire confidence and with things fearful ... and leading us to choose danger and to face it, either because to do so is noble, or because not to do so is base. But to court death as an escape from poverty, or from love, or from some grievous pain, is no proof of bravery, but rather of cowardice.”

MeanStatesPainFacesPovertyDangerInspireConcernedBraveryCourtNobleProofFearfulCowardice
Book:The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle
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“Persuasion is effected through the medium of the hearers, when they shall have been brought to a state of excitement under the influence of speech; for we do not, when influenced by pain or joy, or partiality or dislike, award our decisions in the same way; about which means of persuasion alone, I declare that the system-mongers of the present day busy themselves.”

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Book:Treatise on Rhetoric: Literally Translated from the Greek
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“As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.”

MenWellsMeanNationsCenturySeriousTasteCapacityConcernPropertyWesternNotionFavorsPursuitPrimariesLeisureProsperousSerious Life
Author:Allan Bloom
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“Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.”

MenMeanHas BeensLife IsTermWorstCostOvercomingDepthHeightObsessedThinkerWorth LivingModernityNihilismLiving OnBourgeoisRepresentingIllusoryContinentalLife Is Not Worth Living
Author:Allan Bloom
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“By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love - the earth and the wonders thereof - the sea - the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.”

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Book:Stories. Selected,
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“First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I'm inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word "revolution" loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.”

PeopleMindFirstsBelieveMayMeanSometimesUsedGoalResultsStudyRevolutionProgramMethodCarefulObjectivesMotiveCharacteristicsConsiderationHistoricChanging Your Mind
Author:Malcolm X
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“We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don't feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D.C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights. No, we want it now or we don't think anybody should have it.”

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Book:By any means necessary
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“In my work, you get used to criticisms. Of course you do, because there are a lot of people trying to get you down, but I always cheer up immensely if one is particularly wounding because I think well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left. That is why my father always taught me: never worry about anyone who attacks you personally; it means their arguments carry no weight and they know it.”

PeopleIfsThinkingKnowsTryingWellsMeanPoliticalUsedCoursesFatherLeftWorryTaughtArgumentCriticismWeightCheerCheer UpPolitical Arguments
Author:Margaret Thatcher
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“Success is in the student, not in the university; greatness is in the individual, not in the library; power is in the man, not in his crutches. A great man will make opportunities, even out of the commonest and meanest situations. If a man is not superior to his education, is not larger than his crutches or his helps, if he is not greater than the means of his culture, which are but the sign-boards pointing the way to success, he will never reach greatness. Not learning, not culture alone, not helps and opportunities, but personal power and sterling integrity, make a man great.”

IfsMenWayMeanHelpingCultureOpportunityIndividualSituationGreaterStudentsGreatnessHe ManIntegrityLibraryUniversitySuperiorsBoardsGreat MenPointingPersonal PowerCrutchesSterlingWay To Success
Author:Orison Swett Marden
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