Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated gradtuates - people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life"."
"Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid."
"I'm trying to be entertaining without being mean"
"If you want to condemn yourself for the mistakes you've made, let's be fair, that means you've got to congratulate yourself for all the good things you've done. It's okay to say, "God, I wish I'd done this; yeah, but I did do that." Then it kind of balances out."
"Raising the minimum wage means raising the living wage - and that's good news for Ohio."
"Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief - WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?"
"Darkroom work had, after all, never interested me except as a means to an end; the place I wanted to be was outside in the light."
"Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself."
"I make music that makes you dance, so I mean, it's appropriate, you know what I'm saying? I make the kind of music that DJs can grab a hold of and spin the record and people just love rocking out to the big Snoop D O double G."
"I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?"
"My tactics were, by God's aid, to employ every means to make it clear what the requirement of Christianity truly is."
"Skepticism, is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, Well, what have we here?"
"Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct."
"The moment we use the term 'help', a kind of egocentric idea enters into us. If we help someone, that means we are in a superior position. When we help, we feel that we are one step ahead or one step higher than the ones that we are helping. But if we serve someone, then we offer our capacity with humility, on the strength of our loving concern and oneness. So let us use the proper term, 'service'."
"A song has a life of its own. It's an autonomous thing, separate from your own experience, almost. And the mere repetition of it means it's subject to change; it means approaching it differently, expressing different emotional aspects of it. It doesn't feel like wallowing."
"If you took all of my money away, I would have it right back. I don't really care about money. I mean I do but why worry about it because I can make my own money all the time."
"The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means."
"I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their [bleeping] Representatives are."
"Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no."
"When you die, that does not mean that you lose to cancer."
