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Meanness Quotes

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Meanness Quotes

“En saa kalden god Ven fortaalte mig nyeligen udi Fortroelighed, at nogle udi et vist Selskab talede ilde om min Person, og at han havde taget mig udi Forsvar. Jeg takkede ham for hans Forsvar; men sagde derhos, at jeg vilde have været ham end meer Tak skyldig, hvis han ikke havde fortaalt mig det selv: Thi jeg kunde ikke ansee slige Rapporter som Venskabs-Tegn, saasom de tiene til intet, uden at sætte en udi Bevægelse, og at saae U-eenigheds Sæd blant Mennesker. Jeg holder just ikke den for min Fiende, som i et lystigt Sælskab skiemter med min Person, men heller den som rapporterer mig saadant Skiemt: Den første meener over et Glas Viin ofte intet dermed, men skiemter, enten for at vise sin frugtbare Geist, eller for at giøre Selskabet lystigt. Den anden derimod, som forebringer mig Snak, som er mig umagtpaaliggende at vide, og som han kand være forsikkret om at ville foruroelige mit Sind, kand intet Godt derved meene.”

“Jacks eyes took on the same disturbing, godforsaken look from the coach. 'It wasn't that long ago that I saw you in my church, willing to promise me almost anything to make the pain stop. Was that a lie? Or have you already forgotten the way heartbreak rips apart the soul piece by piece, how it turns you in to a masochist, making you long for the thing that just eviscerated you until there's nothing left of you to be destroyed?' His cold fingers dug in to her cheek. She squared her shoulders and pulled away. 'Are you still talking about my heartbreak, or about yours?' Jacks laughed and gave her a smile so sharp it could have sliced a diamond. 'You're getting better at the meanness, Little Fox. But you have to have a working heart for it to break. I do not.”

“I have made up my mind to say my say. I shall do it kindly, distinctly; but I am going to do it. I know there are thousands of men who substantially agree with me, but who are not in a condition to express their thoughts. They are poor; they are in business; and they know that should they tell their honest thought, persons will refuse to patronize them—to trade with them; they wish to get bread for their little children; they wish to take care of their wives; they wish to have homes and the comforts of life. Every such person is a certificate of the meanness of the community in which he resides. And yet I do not blame these people for not expressing their thought. I say to them: 'Keep your ideas to yourselves; feed and clothe the ones you love; I will do your talking for you. The church can not touch, can not crush, can not starve, cannot stop or stay me; I will express your thoughts.”

“Vile people displayed no gift for poetry or aptitude to display kindness. The Captain could not stretch the lineament of his mind beyond his own hide. He did not see his shadow. He could not hear the Parnassus muse whose voice raps at the hidden door of the poet’s soul. He had no coyote spirit to guide him; he was unable to comprehend the passionate wilderness of life. He could not talk to nature. He could not make friends with the thunder and he could not see beauty in the lightning. He did not open his bedroom window to let in the sweet smell of night rain. His hooded eyes did not glow in the moonlight. He did not appreciate the taste of quaintness. He could not sense the feelings of other people who soaked in the rose scented silence of a sunset. He was incapable of oneness. He never discovered how to dance barefooted for pure joy under a sprinkle of stars or take a knee in a meadow of tears mourning other people’s sorrow.”

“Sadness, lack of recognition, and loneliness turn into bitterness. When people believe that their identity is unrecognized, it feels like injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out, seek ways to humiliate those who they feel have humiliated them. Loneliness thus leads to meanness. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.”

“Я мальчик, господин Биркенштакк... На мужчин я насмотрелся в эти дни, ну их к чёрту. Они и предать могут, и убить беззащитного. Слава Хранителям, я ещё ни в чём таком не замешан. И нечего меня сравнивать с мужчинами... Тоже мне похвала... (Галиен Тукк - советнику Биркенштакку)”

“Но это был не просто мальчик, а злой мальчик. Даже подловатый. Запанибрата держался с пожилыми матросами, а молодым, случалось, тыкал украдкой кулаком в зубы... Но в то же время - не трус. (О втором лейтенанте монитора Хариусе)”

“Many public officials are using the power of their offices to defy the law of the land. Through their irresponsible actions, their inflammatory statements, and their dissemination of distortions and half-truths, they have succeeded in arousing abnormal fears and morbid antipathies within the minds of underprivileged and uneducated whites, leaving them in such a state of excitement and confusion that they are led to acts of meanness and violence that no normal person would commit.”

“When the great ship containing the hopes and aspirations of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death, chaos and disaster, I am willing to go down with the ship. I will not be guilty of the ineffable meanness of paddling away in some orthodox canoe. I will go down with the ship, with those who love me, and with those whom I have loved. If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender; it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel, to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine: neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.”

“We do not engage in idle or intentional gossip which undermines someone else's integrity or which spreads the seeds of fear by talking unthinkingly about illness, disasters, and all the other fears which run rampant in the world.”

“Inside the music like this, she understood many things. She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy, but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted to be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed.”

“Why, over the past two decades, have we seen this epidemic of loneliness and meanness, this breakdown in the social fabric? We can all point to some contributing factors: social media, widening inequality, declining participation in community life, declining church attendance, rising populism and bigotry, vicious demagoguery from our media and political elites. I agree that these factors have all contributed to produce what we are enduring. But as the years have gone by, I have increasingly fixated on what I see as a deeper cause of our social and relational crisis. Our problem, I believe, is fundamentally moral. As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. I realize the phrase “moral formation” may sound stuffy and archaic, but moral formation is really about three simple, practical things. First, it is about helping people learn how to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. Second, it’s about helping people find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Third, it’s about teaching the basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you.”

“Extremism is marked by a closed mind and a meanness of spirit - unwilling to listen, unwilling to reason, unwilling to compromise, unwilling to forgive, and in the end, unwilling to learn and unwilling to grow.”

“In stating these matters, I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”

“No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that they're gonna catch you on the sunny side or that you're gonna be nice this time. The tyranny is inconsistency. Somebody thats consistently mean is something that is pretty easy to sort out. The reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes. That's the whole point of meanness because otherwise it's too obvious. It's the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction. That is the problem and so the fact that you have this belief that there is hope in the relationship is foundational to the dysfunction.”

“Mi fermai, fissando lo schermo incredulo. Un euro valeva più o meno settecento colones. Con i miei “miseri” seimila euro sul conto, avevo la bellezza di 4.3 milioni di colones costaricensi. Scoppiai a ridere e presi a girare in tondo sullo stretto marciapiede, le mani tra i capelli. Sembravo uno che ha appena vinto la lotteria: in Costa Rica ero, a tutti gli effetti, un milionario.”

“Caustique ? Vous voulez dire : méchant ? Oui, je suis un peu méchant, dit Settembrini. Mon regret c'est que je sois obligé de gaspiller ma méchanceté à des sujets aussi misérables. J'espère que vous n'avez rien contre la méchanceté, mon cher ingénieur. A mon sens, c'est l'arme la plus étincelante de la raison contre les puissances des ténèbres et de la laideur. La méchanceté, monsieur, est l'esprit de la critique, et la critique est à l'origine du progrès et des lumières de la civilisation.”

“I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else." "Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.”

“In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.”

“Take the particular trick of false names. It seems to us particularly odious. We think when we show our contempt for those who use this subterfuge that we are giving them no more than they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate with criminals and vagabonds; a piece of crawling and sneaking...Men whose race is universally known, will unblushingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their original and true name be used in its place.”

“I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.”

“I am not here to pass civilities or compliments with you, but on other business. I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them... and as I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.”

“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. To acquire it, appears not more difficult than to be dispossessed of it when acquired, since it enables the holder to shift his own errors on dependents, and to take their merits to himself. But the miracle of losing it vanishes, when we reflect that we are as liable to fall as to rise, by the treachery of others; and that to say "I am" is language that has been appropriated exclusively to God!”

“There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.”

“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.”

“Chris [ Nolan] and I have a strange way of working from the non-movie process, where after all these conversations and reading the script and more conversations, Chris went out and shot the films and the first thing he did, he wouldn't show it to me until I had written the music - not out of meanness, or anything, it just sort of seemed an interesting idea to see if there was some synchronicity and letting me use my imagination to the fullest instead of being constricted by cuts and images.”

“Children who wish to become good and great men or good and noble women, should try to know well all the people whom they meet. Thus they will find that there is no one who has not much of good; and when they see some great folly, or some meanness, or some cowardice, or some fault or weakness in another person, they should examine themselves carefully. Then they will see that, perhaps, they too have some of the same fault in themselves - although perhaps it does not come out in the same way - and then they must try to conquer that fault.”