Petty's Quotes

#1. If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compar'd with loss of thee will not seem so.

William Shakespeare

#2. To just burn out, to give up just because things don't go your way, to assume that there is no God, no infinite light - I think that's pretty petty, personally.

Frederick Lenz

#3. Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.

Sheri S. Tepper

#4. Chief security officer on an OPA ship was a half-assed kind of position, one part cop, one part efficiency expert, and pretty much all den mother to a crew of a thousand people with their own agendas and petty power struggles and opinions on how he should be doing his job better.

James S.A. Corey

#5. If you look around at America, that's one of its biggest problems is you have corporations that can never be pleased at a profit.

Tom Petty

#6. I just had this New York thing. When I got there, I felt so at home. I said, 'This is where the crazy people go.' It's OK to be yourself in New York. In L.A., it's difficult.

Lori Petty

#7. It's very easy to be cynical about the hall of fame. But on the other hand, it's really a beautiful thing for someone like me. I dedicated my entire life to this music.

Tom Petty

#8. Hmm. Petty? Yes. Ineffectual? Yes. Infuriating and off-putting? Yes. Counterproductive? Yes. It's got to be a product of the French Foreign Ministry.

Glenn Reynolds

#9. There's obviously some strange correspondence between the general outline of a life and that stream of petty events in which a person is constantly involved and regards as insignificant.

Victor Pelevin

#10. A person can allow a tyrannical world to bully them. One can kowtow to the demands of petty tormentors; blithely accept being the drummer boy for other people's private parade. Alternatively, a person can seek to obtain autonomy over their life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#11. Radio used to be dominated by Tom Petty and artists like that. If Tom Petty came out today, he'd be played on country radio - all that stuff would. I think the genre has opened itself up to more styles of country, and I think that's a good thing.

Charles Kelley

#12. Girls can be so petty and jealous. I swear they're worse than guys sometimes. Except they're all quiet about it. They sugarcoat it or else they talk behind each other's backs. It's seriously twisted.

Melody Carlson

#13. I'm certainly not a Robin Hood, I'm not that way. I don't want to come through, burn everybody for $200 a ticket and then they can't afford to come see me again. Plus, I just don't think it's right. I don't think we need that much money. I just do what seems like the logical thing to do.

Tom Petty

#14. No matter how long you play the guitar, there's always something else to learn.

Tom Petty

#15. If I would go up on a high note, Eddie would want a low one. That's how petty the situation had become.

Sammy Hagar

#16. What I've learned about marriage: You need to have each other's back; you have to be a kind of team going through life.

Tom Petty

#17. The professor's motive was in the grand scheme of things terribly petty " Greenwood said. ""Pilate's Cross" is inspired by the questions this terrible crime created but as a work of fiction it is set in a different place and time and has a more complex motive for the murders.

J. Alexander Greenwood

#18. It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt
make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.

David Sedaris

#19. Maybe that's how one becomes a killer. Not with decision, but with acceptance.

Heather W. Petty

#20. It's all about racing on the track.

Adam Petty

#21. Never get into the petty habit of measuring yourself worth against other people's net worth.

Robin Sharma

#22. "And for God's sake, never get into the petty habit of measuring your self-worth against other people's net-worth. As Yogi Ramen preached: 'Every second you spend thinking about someone elses dreams you take time away from your own.'"

Robin Sharma

#23. That's what faith is - that belief that there's somebody there that's going to help you and push you and be that person that is there for you when you're in your deepest, darkest moment.

Kyle Petty

#24. I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

Lorrie Moore

#25. Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.

Tom Petty

#26. ...the leader must 1) avoid getting swamped in detail; 2) not be petty; 3) not be pompous; 4) know how to select people to fit the task; 5) trust others to do a job without the leader's meddling; 6) be capable of clear decisions; 7) inspire confidence.

J. Oswald Sanders

#27. Life's to short to spend it fighting when you could be holding the one you love. And love's to rare to squnder it with petty concerns. The Apolloite groom to Rafael

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#28. Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.

Phillips Brooks

#29. A beautiful life is about spending your time passionately, being happy with who you are inside, and not worrying about everyone's petty judgments. If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for everyone's approval. You don't need anyone's approval to be happy or to follow your heart.

Shivesh Thakur

#30. TV does not care about you or what happens to you. It's downright bad for your health now, and that's not a far-out concept. I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health.

Tom Petty

#31. One of my major shortcomings - I'm vindictive. I don't know why that is. Even in petty things in my life I tend to strike back. It's a lot more pleasurable a sensation than feeling threatened.

Andy Rooney

#32. If guys don't respect themselves, they don't respect other people. That's times and personalities. And all of them are not that way. But it don't take but one or two to screw up the whole crowd.

Richard Petty

#33. I don't get into these petty things, Kentucky-Louisville. To me, it's nonsense ... There will be people at Kentucky that will have a nervous breakdown if they lose to us ... They've got to put the fences up on bridges. There will be people consumed by Louisville.

Rick Pitino

#34. My sister got lucky, married a yuppie, and took him for all he was worth. Now she's a swinger dating a singer, I can't decide which is worse.

Tom Petty

#35. Music really isn't supposed to be perfect. It's all about people relating to each other and doing something that's really from the soul. It must come from the soul.

Tom Petty

#36. No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics
the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working concensus to tackle any big problem.

Barack Obama

#37. I don't think political correctness doesn't make any difference. Once that's in your DNA, you don't pass an ordinance or pass a law or all of the sudden change your DNA.

Kyle Petty

#38. Immersing myself in Shakespeare's plays, reading them closely under the guidance of a brilliant, plain-spoken professor changed my life: It opened up the great questions; it put my petty problems into perspective. It got me out of bed in the mornings and kept me in the library late into the night.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#39. I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.

John Shelton Reed

#40. You can only live on the past for so long, and we kind of stretched our luck on that. We think we're on the way back, but it's just a matter of how quickly things come together. Common sense tells you it's not going to happen overnight because we're trying to catch up.

Richard Petty

#41. I like a good beer. Of course, I'll drink a bad one too. Let no person thirst for lack of real ale! Thank god for long-necked bottles, the angel's remedy.

Tom Petty

#42. The first thing they gave me at 'Sports Illustrated' was a first-class air card. 'And oh, by the way, there's the petty cash drawer,' they told me. 'Take a few thousand dollars for expenses.'

Dan Jenkins

#43. Sometimes, giving up your privacy is a little like going to the dentist and we have let him have access that no one's ever had.

Tom Petty

#44. We're often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there's a God - and I believe there is - that God is there to help. That's what God's job is.

Anne Lamott

#45. And the days went by like paper in the wind. Everything changed, then changed again. It's hard to find a friend. It's hard to find a friend.

Tom Petty

#46. I remember I once told him: 'Women's minds are so petty, so crooked!' 'Like the feet of Chinese women,' he replied. 'Has not the pressure of society cramped them into pettiness and crookedness? They are but pawns of the fate which gambles with them. What responsibility have they of their own?

Rabindranath Tagore

#47. This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.

Mihir S. Sharma

#48. Artists should be aware that petty stroking could be the source of arrested productivity. An artist's job includes the avoidance of premature closure by the begged or gratuitous approval of others.

Robert Genn

#49. Let it go. That's my philosophy: learn to not give a fuck, at least about petty shit. Life will be much simpler.

Cherrie Lynn

#50. This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government's petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don't.

Jeremy Clarkson

#51. I don't think it's a good attitude in your life to feel that you have to be rich to have self-esteem.

Tom Petty

#52. Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

Robert W. Service

#53. I don't understand the ones that have no sense of hope and invest in hate. That's not gonna work out, you know? It's a waste of your time!

Tom Petty

#54. Working on a ranch is heaven. It's a hard life, featuring plenty of hard work, and yet at the same time it's an easy life. You're outside all the time. Most days it's just you and the animals. You don't have to deal with people or offices or any petty bullshit. You just do your job.

Chris Kyle

#55. She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis, loves horses, and her boyfriend, too.

Tom Petty

#56. There's a freeway running through the yard.

Tom Petty

#57. You've got a lot to look forward to in Heaven. Compared to what's in store for you in Heaven, your current pain and problems are petty.

Rick Warren

#58. Disclosing one's "deep, dark secrets" makes them no less deep or dark or secret than any other petty flaw.

Alan De Jager

#59. I do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he's nowhere near being in love.

Orhan Pamuk

#60. God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

Bono

#61. It's a petty thing, but I wouldn't join the Scouts when I was a kid, 'cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I'm just not a royalist. I think it's idiotic, a hereditary principle.

Elvis Costello

#62. Petty unselfishness," she repeated. "I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learnt to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves.

E. M. Forster

#63. God, it's so painful when something that's so close is still so far out of reach.

Tom Petty

#64. Laurent, just turned twenty, and possessing an elaborate mind with a gift for planning, detached it from the petty intrigues of the court and set it loose on the broader canvas of this, his first command.

C.S. Pacat

#65. I should have known right then it was too good to last, God, it's such a drag when you're livin' in the past

Tom Petty

#66. Making a record? You've got to have the song, then you create a record. I think it's the same with a live performance. If the material is strong, you're already 90% there. I always tell young people it's all about the music, the songs. Work on the songs, work on the songs, work on the songs.

Tom Petty

#67. I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty.

Imelda Marcos

#68. 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

#69. MEASURED IN THE BLOOD spilt in leadership challenges or the bile spewed daily in parliament, the developed world's most stable economy has produced the most volatile and petty politics.

Nick Bryant

#70. The energy of the crowd is insane. Twenty thousand people. It's the biggest jolt of adrenaline. It's very hard to explain. You know the old story about the woman lifting the car off her kid? It's in that realm. You can actually hurt yourself and not know it.

Tom Petty

#71. He had a great general's ability to focus on his goals and brush aside obstacles as petty distractions. "You can abuse me, you can strike me," Rockefeller said, "so long as you let me have my own way.

Ron Chernow

#72. One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime.

Gregory Maguire

#73. 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

#74. We should not have a petty regard for God's gifts, though we may and should despise our own imperfections.

Saint Ignatius

#75. Evil is evil. Big. Small. Grand. Petty. Well-justified or just because. There's no lesser or greater of it. Choosing between them does not make your soul any less blackened.

C.T. Phipps

#76. What's terrible is that there's nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.

Ivan Turgenev

#77. It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music.

Tom Petty

#78. My grandfather is the king, my Dad's the prince, I guess that makes me the butler.

Adam Petty

#79. There is no evidence that dogs have the kind of complex emotional lives and value systems that we do. It's one reason why we love them so much, in fact. They are neither "good" nor "bad." They don't hold grudges, act in petty ways, or seek revenge. They read our moods, but not our minds.

Jon Katz

#80. Faith is believing that there's somebody there to make you stronger. There's somebody there that won't leave you alone; God's always standing by you. That's what that is.

Kyle Petty

#81. The real purpose of the martial arts must be to purge oneself of petty ambitions and desire, to obtain control of one's own character.

Morihei Ueshiba

#82. There are many kinds of betrayals. There are the small ones: the unkind word, the laughter behind someone's back, the petty lies. And there are the betrayals that break hearts, destroy worlds, and turn the strong, sweet light of day into bitter dust.

Gillian Shields

#83. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country's cause.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#84. People come, people go
Some grow young, some grow cold
I woke up in between
A memory and a dream
So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint
Let's head on down the road
There's somewhere I gotta go
And you don't know how it feels
You don't know how it feels to be me

Tom Petty

#85. I think it's important to always offer something new.

Tom Petty

#86. People you've known, seemingly forever, may claim to have love for you, but when gossip's tainted tongue whips you - they don't show enough love to weigh your history against false witness. Be that as it may, press forward as the dust settles. Your purpose is much bigger than their paltriness.

T.F. Hodge

#87. I don't think there's a petty system of heaven and hell. The love of God is much more forgiving. I'm not a believer in a wrathful God at all.

Susan Sarandon

#88. One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is. If henceforth I were miserable, it would be my own fault: and I vowed never to waste my substance on petty domestic conflict.

Theodore Dalrymple

#89. The more personal, revealing and sniveling, the more interesting...I wanna feel like I'm snooping, peeking thru the keyhole into somebody's, anybody's, private hell...no detail is too petty if it's honest...

Aline Kominsky-Crumb

#90. There's no room for petty grievances in politics.

Sergei Lavrov

#91. now he was about to be killed because of yet another petty human with more power than sense. It didn't seem fair.

James S.A. Corey

#92. I just loved the driving part. If I didn't race anybody, it didn't make any difference as long as I could drive. It's just the physical part of getting in the car and being able to go run fast and being able to drive.

Kyle Petty

#93. We're not going to pay attention to the silliness and the petty comments. And quite frankly, women have joined me in this effort, and so it's not about appearances. It's about effectiveness.

Katherine Harris

#94. No one wants to quit when he's losing and no one wants to quit when he's winning.

Richard Petty

#95. It's always been great to be onstage. It's really effortless up there. It's not a lot of work.

Tom Petty

#96. The only part I miss about driving is driving. That's it. I don't miss all the other stuff that goes along with it, all the other PR stuff. Anybody, when they quit driving, they miss the driving part.

Kyle Petty

#97. I think it's odd that grown-ups quarrel so easily and so often and about such petty matters. Up to now I always thought bickering was just something children did and that they outgrew it.

Anne Frank

#98. I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

Lynn Coady

#99. When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more.

Tom Petty

#100. There's a romance to danger. There's a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the STORY of our lives better.

Joey Comeau