Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"But when I first got cancer, after the initial shock and the fear and paranoia and crying and all that goes with cancer - that word means to most people ultimate death - I decided to see what I could do to take that negative and use it in a positive way."
"I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman."
"I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them."
"Wearing a bath towel around the school yard and pretending it's a cape doesn't mean you have magical powers."
"As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished."
"I think one of the things the church service means is hope."
"But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you."
"You can be creative only when there is abandonment-which means, really, there is no sense of compulsion, no fear of not being, of not gaining, of not arriving. Then there is great austerity, simplicity, and with it there is love."
"Just because I rock doesn't mean I am made of stone."
"The beautiful people in the magazines, got the normal ones living beyond their means."
"What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable."
"Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live."
"It's more impressive," I said out loud. "From a distance, I mean. You can't see the wear on things, you know? You can't see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it."
"The lyrics stand today (1980). They're still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan. I want to know what you're going to do after you've knocked it all down. I mean, can't we use some of it? What's the point of bombing Wall Street? If you want to change the system, change the system. It's no good shooting people."
"When I heard that Hitler had problems with flatulence, it's funny. What - does that make him a funny man? No. It means he had funny moments when his rear end was speaking louder than his mouth."
"The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education."
"Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different."
"When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else."
"This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is unconditionalness. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things."
"Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary."
