Pettiness Quotes

I worked on Capitol Hill for five years, and I saw how things work and how they do not. I saw the partisanship, the gridlock, the pettiness, and the corruption.

I enjoy my pettiness with a dose of wit.

Let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our nation's future is at stake.

The Constitution gives us a standard to follow. We cannot define impeachable offenses to a greater degree than the language of the Constitution. But we all agree the issue is the public trust. Our duty is not to punish anyone. And our challenge is to avoid pettiness.

Remember, always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

Small minds are captivated by trifles.

I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.

Everybody in the world has to compromise. I don't know one person that gets everything they want, so the politicians are going to have to figure that out and stop pointing out, "He shook hands with a Democrat in 1989. He ate with a Republican last week." It's petty high school, even junior high stuff going on. It's junior high politics going on, so it's a shame.

The Tao has no place for pettiness, and nor has Virtue. Pettiness is dangerous to Virtue; pettiness is dangerous to the Tao. It is said, rectify yourself and be done.

The most miserable pettifogging in the world is that of a man in the court of his own consciences.

Exemplary persons are steadfast in the face of adversity, while petty persons are engulfed by it.

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.

Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.

In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.

The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today. We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

I believe people who go into politics want to do the right thing. And then they hit a big wall of re-election and the pettiness of politics. In the end, politics gets in the way of the business of people.

At the end of the day what matters most is that we can cut through the pettiness and drama when it really counts and support each other.

I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.

La Guardia, the petty and the pitiful!

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness.

If I would go up on a high note, Eddie would want a low one. That's how petty the situation had become.

None of what follows will make sense absent a single social fact: The field of paleontology is mean. It has always been mean. It is, in the words of Uppsala University professor Per Ahlberg, “a honeypot of narcissists.” It is “a snake pit of personality disorders.” “An especially nasty area of academia,” the Field Museum’s Jingmai O’Connor calls it. Among the subfields, nastiness correlates with the size and carnivorousness of the creature under study, the comity possible among those who study ammonites being unlikely among those who study T. rex. A “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism” is how his biographer describes Sir Richard Owen, the man who coined the term dinosaur. The first two famous American paleontologists, the prickly academic Othniel Marsh and the gentleman naturalist Edward Cope, savaged each other in print, hired spies and counterspies, destroyed fossils, and generally worked harder to humiliate each other than to describe the boxes and boxes and boxes of remains they pulled from the extraordinarily rich fossil beds of the American West.

A noble heart cannot suspect in others the pettiness and malice that it has never felt.