Meanness quotes:

Send

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom. -- Karl Kraus
In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness. -- Dennis Prager
I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments. -- William John Wills
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
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
Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. -- George Sand
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
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
Meanness demeans the demeaner far more than the demeaned. -- Malcolm Forbes
Meanness is more in half-doing than in omitting acts of generosity. -- Elbert Hubbard
Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else. -- Aristotle
[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed. -- Aristotle
Meanness is the one thing I do get upset about on those rare occasions when I see it. -- Maya Soetoro-Ng
That was when I learned that kindness could break a heart just as sure as meanness. The difference was the kindness made that broken heart softer. Meanness just made the heart want to be hard. -- Susie Finkbeiner
Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away. -- Phyllis McGinley
Anonymity breeds meanness. -- Sam Altman
I've met little meanness, wherever I went. -- Reynolds Price
Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. -- Walter Bagehot
With gentleness overcome anger. With generosity overcome meanness. With truth overcome deceit. -- Gautama Buddha
Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good. -- Abraham Lincoln
Leftists' meanness toward those with whom they differ has no echo on the normative right. -- Dennis Prager
Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world. -- Walter Bagehot
Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away. -- Cormac McCarthy
When you give a lesson in meanness to a critter or a person, don't be surprised if they learn their lesson. -- Will Rogers
Wealth and poverty; one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. -- Plato
When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts. -- Linda Hunt
You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust. -- Robert Crumb
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
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. -- Henry David Thoreau
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
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
One should live between extravagance and meanness. Don't save money by starving your mind. It is false economy never to take a holiday, or never to spend money for an evening's amusement or for a useful book. -- Orison Swett Marden
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
Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977. -- J. R. Moehringer
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
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
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
It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -- John Steinbeck
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
This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. -- Rumi
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. -- John Adams
An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. -- Samuel Johnson
Good-humor is allied to generosity, ill-humor to meanness. -- Sir Fulke Greville
I guess there's just a meanness in this world -- Bruce Springsteen
Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame. -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts. -- Sue Monk Kidd
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness. -- George Saunders
Waste begets self-will; thrift begets meanness: but better be mean than self-willed. -- Confucius
Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness. -- Miguel de Cervantes
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness. -- James Martineau
Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature. -- Jeannette Walls
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal. -- George Santayana
I just felt the power and the meanness of the man I was messing with. -- Muhammad Ali
I don't let negative attitudes and meanness from other people keep me from living my life. -- Ruby Gettinger
Lovers should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Flattery is often a traffic of mutual meanness, where although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived. -- Charles Caleb Colton
A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art. -- Lord Chesterfield
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind. -- Alice Munro
Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. -- Henry David Thoreau
Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition. -- Edmund Burke
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There`s some nastiness, there`s some meanness there. There`s something going on in the mosques and other places. -- Donald Trump
How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite. -- Voltaire
They wanted to know why I did what I did. Well, sir I guess there's just meanness in the world. -- Bruce Springsteen
To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. -- Peter Medawar
I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group -- Peggy McIntosh
The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference. -- William Makepeace Thackeray
Just as lavishness leads easily to presumption, so does frugality to meanness. But meanness is a far less serious fault than presumption. -- Confucius
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness. -- William Hazlitt
I like that kind of thing. I like warmth and uncalled-for kindness, the small unnoticed generosities that speckle the meanness of the world. -- Roland Merullo
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
There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness. -- Carol Rifka Brunt
Of all faults the one she most despised in others was the want of bravery; the meanness of heart which leads to untruth. -- Elizabeth Gaskell
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
Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness. -- Sir Fulke Greville
As all error is meanness, it is incumbent on every man who consults his own dignity, to retract it as soon as he discovers it. -- Samuel Johnson
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
As all error is meanness, it is incumbent on every man who consults his own dignity, to retract it as soon as he discovers it -- Samuel Johnson
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
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
Nothing brings out the lower traits of human nature like office-seeking. Men of good character and impulses are betrayed by it into all sorts of meanness. -- Rutherford B. Hayes
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
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
There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred. -- Thomas Paine
An infallible characteristic of meanness is cruelty. Men who have practiced tortures on animals without pity, relating them without shame, how can they still hold their heads among human beings? -- Samuel Johnson
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
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
To me, every dirty act was simply a sacrament of sin, a passionately religious protest against Christianity, which was for me the symbol of all vileness, meanness, treachery, falsehood and oppression. -- Aleister Crowley
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
The moment we begin tolerating meanness, in ourselves and others, we are using our authorial power in the service of wrongdoing. We have both the capacity and the obligation to do better. -- Martha Beck
There is a false modesty, which is vanity; a false glory, which is levity; a false grandeur, which is meanness; a false virtue, which is hypocrisy, and a false wisdom, which is prudery. -- Jean de la Bruyere
The jealous man lives in hell. Drop comparing and jealousy disappears, meanness disappears, phoniness disappears. But you can drop it only if you start growing your inner treasures; there is no other way. -- Rajneesh
I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. -- Gillian Flynn
I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness. -- Aleksandar Hemon
Know thyself as the pride of His creation, the link uniting divinity and matter; behold a part of God Himself within thee; remember thine own dignity nor dare descend to evil or meanness. -- Akhenaton
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
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

Send