Petty Tyranny Quotes

#1. War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.

C.E.M. Joad

#2. What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in ... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.

Jonathan Blum Kate Orman

#3. No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Edward Abbey

#4. Every man may reign secure in his petty tyranny, and spread terror and desolation around him, until the trump of the Archangel shall excite different emotions in his soul.

James Otis

#5. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny.

G.K. Chesterton

#6. Does the fact that I can no longer remember my own phone number indicate my growing feebleness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concentrate on the important and the critical.

Don Norman

#7. Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.

Thomas Sowell

#8. I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#9. I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed.

Susan Choi

#10. If I could meet my mother and marry her, I would. I would be with my mother now, if she weren't my mother, as sick as that sounds.

Shia Labeouf

#11. We all have our down days, but it's not hard to smile and say, 'Thank you.'

Yvette Nicole Brown

#12. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.

Bertrand Russell

#13. Science tells me God must exist. My mind tells me I will never understand God. And my heart tells me I am not meant to.

Dan Brown

#14. Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it 'creative observation.' Creative viewing.

William S. Burroughs