#pettiness

Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up? ↗

— Sean Covey

#jealousy #pettiness #jealousy

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. ↗

— Kevin Costner

#big #business #do the right thing #end #gets

In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together. ↗

— Margaret J. Wheatley

#angry #capacity #daily #daily life #deceitful

Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts. ↗

— Sheri S. Tepper

#curse #destiny #divine-intervention #fate #fortune

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

— Jean Racine

#felt #heart #malice #never #noble

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#ambition #democracy #egalitarianism #equality #essence

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. ↗

— Simone Weil

#because #best #ends #great #lives

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. ↗

— Martin Heidegger

#anxiety #become #death #face #free

We believe - we believe that, if we tell the people the truth, that they will act bigger than the pettiness we see in Washington, D.C. We believe it is possible to forge bipartisan compromise, and stand up for our conservative principles. ↗

— Chris Christie

#believe #bigger #bipartisan #compromise #conservative

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #denunciation #evil #good #jews