Top 100 Quotes About Meanness
#1. We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that either, but it's true.
Thomas Wolfe
#2. To live a remote, retired, secluded life is the antipodes of spirituality as Jesus Christ taught it. The test of our spirituality comes when we come up against injustice and meanness and ingratitude and turmoil, all of which have the tendency to make us spiritual sluggards.
Oswald Chambers
#3. The moment one conceives the meaning of human greatness is the moment when one understands the baseness, the triviality and the meanness of the material from which we have to mould it.
Bill Hopkins
#4. When snooty high school bitches grow up, their meanness is distilled into its purest, most lethal form," Emmie whispered fearfully. "Don't you watch Real Housewives?
Jayne Denker
#5. There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here at all.
Viscount Henry St. John Bolingbroke
#6. 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
#7. Leftists' meanness toward those with whom they differ has no echo on the normative right.
Dennis Prager
#8. If a person had accused him of meanness, he could have defended himself. But with a dog - you did something cheap to it when you were sure no one was looking, and it was as though you had done it in front of a mirror.
Paula Fox
#9. I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damn scoundrel, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it ...
Nathan Bedford Forrest
#10. Don't you just hate nights like that, when you think over every mistake you've made, every hurt you've received, every bit of meanness you've dealt out? There's no profit in it, no point to it, and you need sleep.
Charlaine Harris
#11. 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
#12. I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
William Hazlitt
#13. Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.
Jeannette Walls
#14. 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
#15. Negative emotions, such as the feelings of hatred, meanness, low self-esteem and confidence, and pessimism, create an unpleasant person and a bleak destiny.
Auliq Ice
#16. Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery.
P.N. Elrod
#17. 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
#18. Just as lavishness leads easily to presumption, so does frugality to meanness. But meanness is a far less serious fault than presumption.
Confucius
#19. We've had periods of meanness in American politics. Actually, the dawn of partisan division in America was basically in George Washington's second term, when it was obvious that he would be the first and only consensus president.
William J. Clinton
#20. And while meanness is a function of the insensitive, grumpiness is merely a function of the dissatisfied.
Tom Robbins
#21. Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
William Hazlitt
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. I just felt the power and the meanness of the man I was messing with.
Muhammad Ali
#27. I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group
Peggy McIntosh
#28. I've come to believe that virtue isn't a condition of character. It's an elected action. It's a choice we keep making, over and over, hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness.
Rhoda Janzen
#29. Meanness is a monster that usurps your self-control because you cowardly allow it to conquer you.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#30. I know I'm mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality.
Elena Ferrante
#31. 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
#32. he just accepted my dart of irritation, my pinch of meanness.
Harlem Dae
#33. Boyishness - by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker.
Thomas Hughes
#34. 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
#35. We should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not meet thus in haste.
Henry David Thoreau
#36. I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments.
William John Wills
#37. 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
#38. Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
#39. When you give a lesson in meanness to a critter or a person, don't be surprised if they learn their lesson.
Will Rogers
#40. Conner thought he understood how pride could back up in somebody, get turned around and come out as meanness. But that didn't make it any easier to put up with.
Jean Thompson
#41. Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature.
Jeremy Collier
#42. Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.
Cormac McCarthy
#43. How inexpressible is the meanness of being a hypocrite! how horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite.
Voltaire
#44. In a lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot of meanness.
Dennis Prager
#45. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the Devil was at his elbow
Cormac McCarthy
#46. 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
#47. There are two distinct kinds of meanness - those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort.
Evelyn Waugh
#48. Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.
Walter Bagehot
#49. Oh, child, there's no explainin' the meanness in this world." Armetta shakes her head, wipes wetness off her cheek, then cradles my hands in her palms. "But there's goodness here, too. You can't never lose sight of that, hold on to it. It's the goodness that gets us through.
Susan Carol McCarthy
#50. Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts.
Sue Monk Kidd
#51. Jealousy made you vulnerable. Meanness just made you an ice queen.
Katie Cotugno
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them; for they prove, at least, our power, and show that our favour is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood.
Samuel Johnson
#55. 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
#56. I used to think, if I were the Lord, I would not suffer people to be tried as they are. But I have changed my mind on that subject. Now I think I would, if I were the Lord, because it purges out the meanness and corruption that stick around the saints, like flies around molasses.
John Taylor
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.
Bruce Catton
#61. That's what Ender has to understand. There really is evil in the world, and wickedness, and every brand of stupidity. There's meanness and heartlessness and ... I don't even know which of them is me. - Hyrum Graff
Orson Scott Card
#62. Meanness demeans the demeaner far more than the demeaned.
Malcolm Forbes
#63. Maybe after all it's a good thing to tell people about their meanness and give them a stirring up once in a while.
Gene Stratton-Porter
#64. Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#65. And part of him, a compact, dark lump of meanness buried deep in his chest, had been glad. Let her feel useless. Let her feel like a failure. Let her see that he could do things she never could.
Kiersten White
#66. Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
Plato
#67. We all prefer the love of others to their hatred. We all prefer others' generosity to their meanness. And who among us does not prefer tolerance, respect, and forgiveness of our failings to bigotry, disrespect, and resentment? In
Dalai Lama XIV
#68. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.
Peter Medawar
#69. I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#70. There's just no accounting for evil and meanness, and we can't judge a species by a few bad apples.
Alyssa Day
#71. The devastation of his actions, his meanness, felt like bags of rancid trash heaped around him.
Karen Kingsbury
#72. The belief that it is useless to employ partial and palliative means against radical evils, because they only remedy them in part, is an article of faith never preached unsuccessfully by meanness to simplicity, but it is none the less absurd.
Theodor Mommsen
#73. ... .watch me rise like smoke from fire.
Watch me fly above your hate.
Watch me dance upon your meanness
like a ballerina with posture; grace.
Watch me laugh over your hatred;
watch me soar above your sea of grief.
And know that I am out there somewhere ...
C R U S H I N G.
Coco J. Ginger
#74. A gentleman has ease without familiarity, is respectful without meanness; genteel without affectation, insinuating without seeming art.
Lord Chesterfield
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.
Abraham Lincoln
#78. Did nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness and acquiesced in his torture.
Virginia Woolf
#79. In every one of us is the total of all we have ever been, the sullen child, the arrogant youth, the suckling babe. Every fear endured in childhood is lodged somewhere in here.' He tapped his temple. 'And every act of heroism or cowardice, generosity or meanness of spirit.
David Gemmell
#80. 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
#82. Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.
Rose Macaulay
#83. Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else.
Aristotle.
#84. Fledgeby deserved Mr. Alfred Lammle's eulogium. He was the meanest cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on two.
Charles Dickens
#85. 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
#86. We live in a culture where everyone's opinion, view, and assessment of situations and people spill across social media, a lot of it anonymously, much of it shaped by mindless meanness and ignorance.
Mike Barnicle
#87. Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her.
Joe Meno
#88. With gentleness overcome anger. With generosity overcome meanness. With truth overcome deceit.
Gautama Buddha
#89. Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.
Edmund Burke
#90. These Fatalists preach that Chance and Peril are merely masks for Fate's workings, nothing in themselves, and moreover that all the gods move at Fate's bidding. Their followers take comfort in thinking that their every deed is meant to be; it excuses all manner of meanness.
Sarah Micklem
#91. Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
Plato
#92. Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.
Karl Kraus
#93. The kids who thought of snappy things on the spot never had to worry about being fat or smart or pussies. You had to have a little meanness in you to do it. You had to be willing to embarrass other people sometimes.
Matthew Thomas
#94. Meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far.
Walter Kirn
#95. Who is open without levity; generous without waste; secret without craft; humble without meanness; bold without insolence; cautious without anxiety; regular, yet not formal; mild, yet not timid; firm, yet not tyrannical
is made to pass the ordeal of honor, friendship, virtue.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#96. 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
#97. Thus it is that dignity finds its (firm) root in its (previous) meanness, and what is lofty finds its stability in the lowness (from which it rises).
Lao-Tzu
#98. That is what happens when the heart door opens- you become less yourself than part of everything.' Many are the sentinels who guard that door: our fears, our self-importance, our meanness, our greed, our bitterness, and others.
Roger Housden
#99. I ... Why do you want me to?"
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, and then she said, "Why wouldn't I want you to?"
Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn't say it.
Carol Rifka Brunt
