Top 100 A Mean Man Quotes
#1. A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Marcus Aurelius
#2. It doesn't take much of a rule to measure a mean man.
Malcolm Forbes
#3. My father never was and isn't a mean man. You know, he never was ruthless. And he succeeded in life without sticking it to anybody. And that's a great example for a man, a strong man, a man's man, to give to his children. You can succeed, you can be successful, without walking over somebody.
Maria Shriver
#4. I have great hope of a wicked man, slender hope of a mean one. A wicked man may be converted and become a prominent saint. A mean man ought to be converted six or seven times, one right after the other, to give him a fair start and put him on an equality with a bold, wicked man.
Henry Ward Beecher
#5. This minute that comes
to me over the past
Decillions.
There is no better than it
And now. What behaves well
In the past or behaves well
To-day is not such a wonder.
The wonder is always and
Always how there can be
A mean man or an infidel.
Walt Whitman
#6. He was a mean man, it's true, but he got ahead. A man gets on by working harder than the rest - that's what he used to say - and if he doesn't get anywhere, he hasn't a soul to blame but himself.
Margaret Laurence
#7. Is it or is it not a matter of importance that a young man starts out in life with an ability to shut his jaw hard and say "I will," or "I will not," and mean it?
John William Heisman
#8. I'm sympathetic to the nuns' violent impulses. I mean, if I'd given up sex to devote myself to a man who I had to just trust loved me, despite never being physically around to prove it, I'd probably be smacking little children too.
Sarah Silverman
#10. It is greed and laziness and selfishness, not hunger or weariness or cold, that take the dignity out of a man, and make him look mean.
George MacDonald
#11. The Common lawes of the Realme should by no means be delayed for the law is the surest sanctuary, that a man should take, and the strongest fortresse to protect the weakest of all, lex et tutissima cassis.
Edward Coke
#12. Since birds took flight, they were closer to the spirit world than man was, so ignoring a message from a bird might mean missing some warning or promise from powers greater than oneself.
Jodi Picoult
#13. She got herself a boyfriend she wants us to meet. He's studying chemistry. A senior. She said that 3 or 4 times on the phone. Senior. Like it's supposed to mean something to me, as long as I been grown. Senior ain't nothing but a year. Young man's distinction.
Ravi Howard
#14. Women are much stronger than men. When a woman says enough is enough, which means enough is enough. Man will always lie at her feet in the hope of return. I was lying. And somehow happy.
Mickey Rourke
#15. Because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king.
Louis L'Amour
#16. Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#17. Do you guys ever think about how Hitler has affected the whole world? That just one man did all this? I mean, what if he had been a good man, instead?
Elizabeth Berg
#18. When a man is willing to set aside the legitimate appetites of the body to concentrate on the work of praying, he is demonstrating that he means business, that he is seeking with all his heart, and will not let God go unless He answers.
Arthur Wallis
#19. In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.
Cecil Taylor
#21. We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer ... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.
Steve Jobs
#22. Stop making excuses for why you can't let yourself have this. It's not conventional but that doesn't mean it isn't real. What's more important? Loving the man that loves you, or trying to achieve this bullshit idea you have of what a perfect relationship is supposed to be?
Stacey Wallace Benefiel
#23. Just because women can bear children doesn't mean they're unable to harbour the same sort of career ambitions as a man.
Cathy Kelly
#24. How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?
Clarice Lispector
#25. I hate to say it, but all that stuff they try to tell you about women being empowered and how it's fine for a woman to ask a man out, well, it's crap.'
I look down at my watch. 'Seven fifty-three p.m.'
'What does that mean?'
'Official time of death of feminism,' I reply, and mom laughs.
Robin Epstein
#26. It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'
Charles Lyell
#27. Ordinarily when a man in difficulty turns to prayer, he has already tried every other means of escape.
Austin O'Malley
#28. It is true there is nothing displays a genius, I mean a quickness of genius, more than a dispute; as two diamonds, encountering, contribute to each other's luster. But perhaps the odds is much against the man of taste in this particular.
William Shenstone
#29. What's rare is to have a good, strong man, as opposed to a good, weak man. Those are the ones who ruin the world. Men who mean well, but buckle under others' opinions until their good intentions destroy an untold number of lives." My
Sara Raasch
#30. When I speak of a man growing in grace, I mean simply this - that his sense of sin is becoming deeper, his faith stronger, his hope brighter, his love more extensive, his spiritual mindedness more marked.
J.C. Ryle
#31. Man is the being, among whom only a small minority of the elite ones, find the Greatness of Glorious God, from the study of things and therefrom acquire perfect faith. But the same tool has become the means of deviation for the rest of them.
Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani
#32. The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#33. Can I give a little advice to the old man on Capitol Hill? Stop saying teabagger. Ask your younger staffers what it means.
Andrea Tantaros
#34. I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts o' taking revenge: it can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible.
George Eliot
#35. There is Indian time and white man's time. Indian time means never looking at the clock ... There is not even a word for time in our language.
Mary Brave Bird
#36. Dating is really all about sex. In the conventional context, this means that the man invites the woman to go through a social encounter, the ultimate purpose of which is sexual engagement.
Alexander McCall Smith
#37. If a man does not go about his work with enthusiasm, it means that he has not yet found a work that he likes. Every mortal is a busy bee when he comes to the task that Destiny has set aside for him.
George Ade
#38. By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward. Aye,
Herman Melville
#39. That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. I mean, if a man's really master of his house, he doesna need to tell folks so.
Carol Ryrie Brink
#41. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?
Alexander Hamilton
#42. Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
Eric Hoffer
#43. The power of a man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.
Thomas Hobbes
#44. Slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection.
It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct.
B.R. Ambedkar
#45. You look at the part in '12 Years A Slave,' you finish that script - I mean, it's a powerful story. You go, 'Man, I have to play a bad character in this.' And then you go, 'Well, do I want to play a bad character and contribute to a good story?'
Paul Dano
#46. It is a wife's duty and pleasure to lessen her husband's burdens." "Says who, lizardman?" "Prophet Lashraq, as written in Sheul's true Word." "You mean a man wrote it." "But
R. Lee Smith
#47. Man often thinks of either his past or his future and in the mean time today passes like a fast train, disappearing forever on the horizon of life!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#48. The proud man, then, is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is accordance with his merits, while the others go to excess or fall short.
Aristotle.
#49. A man who is truthful and does not mean ill even to his adversary will be slow to believe charges even against his foes. He will, however, try to understand the viewpoints of his opponents and will always keep an open mind and seek every opportunity of serving his opponents.
Mahatma Gandhi
#50. Being a successful and wealthy man doesn't mean that you have to forget about the place where you were brought up and the people who struggleds to make you a better person
Diyar Harraz
#51. The idea of the straight man is very important. But I'd rather it be somebody else, because it's not as fun. And when I say somebody else, of course I mean Jason Bateman. He's born to play boring characters because he's such a bore. He's one of the most boring human beings.
Will Arnett
#52. Shut the door, he ordered. Safi did, but tensed her muscles. She might have danced and fought with this man, but that didn't mean she trusted him in a room alone.
Susan Dennard
#53. Anytime you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn't enforce its own laws because the color of a man's skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice when the government can't give them justice.
Malcolm X
#55. The most unequivocal sign of contempt for man is to regard everybody merely as a means to one's own ends, or of no account whatever.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#56. (On Barack Obama) I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.
Joe Biden
#57. By a great man, however, we mean a man who, because of his spiritual gifts, his character, and other qualities, deserves to be called great and who as a result earns the power to influence others.
Fredrik Bajer
#58. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Samuel Ullman
#59. Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [ ... ]
I did not know what to say to this.
Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind.
Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.
Dan Simmons
#60. Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.
Michel De Montaigne
#61. It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.
John Maynard Keynes
#62. Animals ... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.
Immanuel Kant
#63. Preaching don't mean you are a true man. You got to go out and do.
Joe Frazier
#64. Your thought describes laws, courts, judges, punishments. Mine explains that when man makes a law, he either violates it or obeys it. If there is a basic law, we are all one before it. He who disdains the mean is himself mean. He who vaunts his scorn of the sinful vaunts his disdain of all humanity.
Khalil Gibran
#65. A good man will not waste himself upon mean and discreditable work or be busy merely for the sake of being busy.
Seneca.
#67. I think there is only one form of greatness for man. If a man can bridge the gap between life and death. I mean, if he can live on after he has died, then maybe he was a great man. To me the only success, the only greatness, is immortality.
James Dean
#68. I do not mean to expose my ideas to ingenious ridicule by maintaining that everything happens to every man for the best; but I will contend, that he who makes the best use of it, fulfills the part of a wise and good man.
Richard Cumberland
#69. A wise and good man will turn examples of all sorts to his own advantage. The good he will make his patterns, and strive to equal or excel them. The bad he will by all means avoid.
Thomas A Kempis
#70. My mouth could deny my interest in Kelly all day long, but my pussy didn't lie. He felt like more than a single person. Two hands, a hard body, a mean voice. A one-man orgy. I'd leave here limping, just as he'd promised.
Cara McKenna
#71. I mean that man is ruled by a tyrant whose name is Ignorance, and that is the tyrant I sought to overthrow. That is the tyrant which gave birth to monarchy, and monarchy is authority based on falsehood, whereas knowledge is authority based on truth. Man should be ruled by knowledge.
Victor Hugo
#72. Some folks think that Christianity means a kind of insurance policy, and that it has little to do with this life, but that it is a very good thing when a man dies.
Henry Ward Beecher
#73. To understand at all what life means, one must begin with Christian belief. And I think knowledge may be sorrow with a man unless he loves.
William Mountford
#74. Passion is a young man's game. Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise. I mean, you're around awhile, you leave certain things to the young. Don't try to act like you're young. You could really hurt yourself.
Bob Dylan
#75. In seeking for justice men seek for the mean or neutral, for the law is the mean. Again, customary laws have more weight, and relate to more important matters, than written laws, and a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not safer than the customary law.
Aristotle.
#76. Just because I have rice on my clothes doesn't mean I've been to a wedding. A Chinese man threw up on me.
Phyllis Diller
#77. Faith means that a man should regard any disaster simply as a fate-determined blow which must be endured.
Anwar Sadat
#78. Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it.
Louisa May Alcott
#79. In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.
Orson Welles
#80. Experience is a safe light to walk by, and he is not a rash man who expects to succeed in future from the same means which have secured it in times past.
Wendell Phillips
#81. There exists in nature a force which is immeasurably more powerful than steam, and by means of which a single man, who knows how to adapt and direct it, might upset and alter the face of the world.
Eliphas Levi
#82. I hate the word feminine! I mean, there is a woman and a man and when I say "woman" it suggests all that is radiant, tender, fascinating, gentle, demoniac, exaggerated! Feminine makes me think of somebody who is spindly and over-sweet: I don't like that!
Sonia Rykiel
#83. Does your license plate mean something?" Bing asked. "En-o-ess-four-a-two?"
"Nosferatu," the man Charlie Manx said.
"Nosfer-what-who?"
Manx said, "It is one of my little jokes. My first wife once accused me of being a Nosferatu. She did not use that exact word, but close enough.
Joe Hill
#84. If you didn't let a man mean too much, you wouldn't be too hurt when he went away. But that didn't mean you had to stop living too. Even if you didn't jump off a cliff there were other ways to end life.
Nora Roberts
#85. I'm a simple man, Janet. I say what I mean and have no talent for games. I want to show you how I feel about you so there's no chance for misunderstanding. If you think I'm trying to romance you, you're right. I am.
Pamela Clare
#86. A man may love a woman perfectly, and yet by no means ignorantly maintain a thousand women have not larger eyes. Enough that she alone has looked at him with eyes that, large or small, have won his soul.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#87. Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God.
He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole
shapeless narrative of his unraveling.
Don DeLillo
#88. There is no such thing in the world as a "self-made man" or a "self-made woman". We've received so much from so many for so long that we can't even keep count. But, simply because we can't keep count, doesn't mean we discount.
Sharad Vivek Sagar
#89. ... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified ... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and claims to give life a form it does not have.
Albert Camus
#90. It was a Magnum .32, CIA issue, gray, mean, heavy, capable of blowing a man away at thirty paces, and leaving nothing more than a red mist, a ghastly mess, and a certain amount of paperwork.
Terry Pratchett
#91. The love of fame is a passion natural and universal, which no man, however high or mean, however wise or ignorant, was yet able to despise.
Samuel Johnson
#92. A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that doesn't mean she can't have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones
Cher
#93. I am succeeding very well so far with my legging, but it is a very mean business for a man that has been well brought up to engage in. It is the only way to get a bill from Cincinnati through, so it must be done.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#94. If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?
Thomas Carlyle
#95. Just because a black man is running the RNC doesn't mean black folks are going to, 'Oh, OK, I will be a Republican.' Just as with the election of President Obama. All the problems and concerns that are very important to African Americans don't get solved overnight.
Michael Steele
#96. Duke Chartres used to boast that no man could have less real value for character than himself, yet he would gladly give twenty thousand pounds for a good one, because he could immediately make double that sum by means of it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#97. God Child is a free and inspirational translation of Adam. Adam means 'human', not 'man'. The Hebrew for 'man' is 'aish'. In English man can mean both man and human, which may have caused the confusion in the first place. If Adam isn't the first male Homo sapiens, who or what is he?
Stefan Emunds
#98. How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?
Pablo Neruda
#99. I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?
Thomas Jefferson
#100. I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits.
G.K. Chesterton
