Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside mean — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the Quality of this land."
"The brilliant Schiller was wrong in his Joan of Arc when he said against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. It is actually by means of the gods that we make our stupidity and gullibility into something ineffable."
"Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism."
"What does it really mean to be a leftist in the early part of the 21st century? What are we really talking about? And I can just be very candid with you. It means to have a certain kind of temperament, to make certain kinds of political and ethical choices, and to exercise certain analytical focuses in targeting on the catastrophic and the monstrous, the scandalous, the traumatic, that are often hidden and concealed in the deodorized and manicured discourses of the mainstream. That's what it means to be a leftist. So let's just be clear about it."
"To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all."
"I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay."
"Whatever happened billions of years ago, that's what were we come from. For people who have hate and anger towards each other just because they've been socially conformed or socially... conditioned to their particular country, doesn't mean that you're not like everyone else in the rest of the world and doesn't mean you should go around hating everybody."
"My story, or my life or my legacy can hopefully show [fans] that once you’re down, that doesn’t mean you’re down forever. You never let up."
"Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have."
"Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here."
"I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs."
"Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say."
"... mathematical knowledge ... is, in fact, merely verbal knowledge. "3" means "2+1", and "4" means "3+1". Hence it follows (though the proof is long) that "4" means the same as "2+2". Thus mathematical knowledge ceases to be mysterious."
"The word courage comes from the French word 'coeur', which means heart. True power proceeds not from force, but from love."
"The fact that there was no catastrophic pandemic in recent history does not mean there won't be another one. And we are certainly not prepared for the next pandemic."
"The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol."
"Certain teams are more careful in what they write. They generate less bugs. You can know that but it still doesn't mean there might be there might not be one bug that would be bad to ship the product with."
"I mean, if we said right now, there's somebody in the next room who's dying, let's all go save their life, you know, everybody would just get up immediately and go get involved in that."
"If we [the USA] don't innovate in education, it's literally going to mean less people get to go have that education at a time when more people are going to want it. We've got to put courses out on the Web, we've got to put interactive learning out on the Web."
"I go and I keep friends with [Abe] Rosenthal at the New York Times and people of that sort, you know. And all - I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances."
