Petty Quotes

Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

Petty things become unimportant when people are impassioned about a purpose higher than self.

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God's children.

A man does not have himself killed for a half-pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him

In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

I don't want to be a politician. I don't like politics. It's petty; it fights dirty.

I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it's so petty.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

To forget, or pretend to do so, to return a borrowed article, is the meanest sort of petty theft.

Let us be done with the notion that religion is confined to petty pieties and small constraints. All too often people who have possessed these pieties have wrought great evil.

It has well been said that the arch-flatterer, with whom all petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self.

The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.

I don’t have time to worry about something as petty as what I look like.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the 'ever needy' man?

I get cranky real easily. So the honor of it and the wonder of it all and everything has a hard time overcoming the petty annoyances; I mean, that's simply the reality of being alive, I guess.

There is no moral distinction between petty thievery and 'from each according to ability, to each according to need.'

Great things alone can make a great mind, and petty things will make a petty mind unless a man rejects them as completely alien.

Men are separated by so many petty things.

It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewiseit is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles.

There is my favorite quote that I ever heard from her [Lori Petty],... 'Things can happen to you, but they don't have to happen to your soul.'

Since the things we do determine the character of life, no blessed person can become unhappy. For he will never do those things which are hateful and petty.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

Contentions fierce, Ardent, and dire, spring from no petty cause.

I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.

A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.

I ain't really sure, but it seems I remember the good times

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

You cannot have a good character today and at the same time have a small mind and a little heart. You cannot have a good character today and be merely a petty reformer.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Vexations may be petty, but they are vexations still.

Your radiance shines in every atom of creation yet our petty desires keep it hidden.

I’d love to have an opportunity to tie the greats in Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt Sr.

Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.

There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark.

Cultivated people foster what is good in others, not what is bad. Petty people do the opposite.

The man of petty ambition if invited to dinner will be eager to be set next his host.

So I started out for God knows where. I guess I'll know when I get there.

There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.

Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things are little.

The worst of misery Is when a nature framed for noblest things Condemns itself in youth to petty joys, And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life Gasping from out the shallows.

There's a romance to danger. There's a romance to drinking, to drugs, to petty crime and to heartbreak and loneliness. All of those things can be used to make the story of our lives better.

Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.

We're not going to pay attention to the silliness and the petty comments. And quite frankly, women have joined me in this effort, and so it's not about appearances. It's about effectiveness.

At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.