Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Just because you're part of 'Twilight' does not mean you're a superstar. It means that you're given the opportunity to maybe become one later if you work hard. Once fandom goes away, which it will very soon, it's all about having your priorities straight and working hard."
"I think we are all overcoming tiny obstacles every second of every day even if that means just a small shift in perspective."
"Life on earth means: the sprouting of wings."
"Even if the absence of government really did mean anarchy in a negative, disorderly sense - which is far from being the case - even then, no anarchical disorder could be worse than the position to which government has led humanity."
"In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men."
"To be baptized means to make the passage with the people of Israel and with Jesus from slavery to freedom and from death to new life. It is a commitment to a life in and through Jesus."
"I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law."
"The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter."
"All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot."
"This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell."
"Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him."
"Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books."
"I don't see how one can "believe in organized religion." What does it mean to believe in an organization? One can join it, support it, oppose it, accept its doctrines or reject them. There are many kinds of organized religion. People associate themselves with some of them, or not, for all sorts of reasons, maybe belief in some of their doctrines."
"It [the internet] should be publicly controlled but Washington is not a system of public control, it's mainly a system of corporate control. We ought to have a free internet, but that means having a free society, and there is fundamental questions there."
"The US is off the spectrum in religious commitment. It's been increasing since 1980 but it's a major part of the voting base of the Republican Party so that means committing to anti-abortion positions, opposing women's rights."
"There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them - that means the commanders."
"If you can unify the public mind saving an iconic species like the tiger, like they did with the panda, that means you have to protect their habitat and everything that they hunt. And that means saving massive, thousands of acres for them to be able to roam and breed. So it's more of a land effort."
"To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses."
"I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me. And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time."
"You can't tell me you can make any system or country work with low wages and high prices, and high wages with high prices don't mean anything when the prices eat up the wages and don't leave anything over."
