Mean quotes
28K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Well, right now, I'm very fascinated with 1920s Berlin. I mean, probably the more interesting thing would be to go to the beginning of civilization or precivilization - like polytheistic times. It would be interesting to see what came before modern religion and culture - what circumstances created the environment or the need for it."
"Pointe shoes are torture devices. I mean, ballerinas get used to it, but it was definitely a new experience for me. They feel medieval. I was very happy to stop wearing them."
"I don't know if the scripts are changing so much. I mean, I've been working for almost 25 years and made over 40 films and I worked with my first female director, on a feature, "Planetarium". And it's still the only one."
"Sure. I've never dated a woman of anything like that, But, I mean, I think it's much more the person that you fall in love with – and why would you close yourself off to fifty percent of the people?"
"Speaking like this doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression."
"The economic philosophy of black nationalism only means that our people need to be re-educated into the importance of controlling the economy of the community in which we live, which means that we won't have to constantly be involved in picketing and boycotting other people in other communities in order to get jobs."
"Racism is a human problem and a crime that is absolutely so ghastly that a person who is fighting racism is well within his rights to fight against it by any means necessary until it is eliminated."
"It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean."
"We are sacrificing ourselves for our ready-made goods; we are consumers and live in such a way that the means may consume the end."
"Parliamentarianism means putting political prostitution in barracks."
"If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me."
"Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end."
"To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion."
"If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress."
"They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty."
"Tell the cook of this restaurant with my compliments that these are the very worst sandwiches in the whole world, and that, when I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in the middle of it."
"Since I was young my wish has been to die in perfect health - I mean to die with a body that is not destroyed by illness but a body that is consumed by its own long burning fire."
"[Speaking to a group of wealthy New Yorkers] A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times — you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you."
"When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody."
"I have always preferred the company of older people. No one in the history of the world has had less interest in the young than I do. I am not interested in what young people are thinking. They're thinking less than old people, of course. I mean, what could they be thinking? And what are they doing? They're doing the same stupid things you did."
