I was
thinking about meanness today, about how the world seems to have gotten much harder
and meaner. How workplaces have also. Or have they always been so and it's just me whose eyes have been opened for good? It's best to focus on the positive in
life, and I try to for the most part. But I cannot ignore the suffering and
pain I see around me and much of it is the result of unkindness on the part of
mean-spirited people who do not wish others well. The reasons for their
meanness are no doubt many. I'm sure there are many explanations and excuses
for their not aspiring to be kind people. So as I was reflecting on this topic
today, I found these quotes about meanness. The first one especially is just as
true today as when it was written in 1945 (from the book Cannery Row by
John Steinbeck), perhaps more so now. Steinbeck is spot on with his description
of the traits of success that we claim to detest, but oh how 'successful' individuals in society who possess these traits are held in awe. We tend to
forget (or perhaps we just want to forget) that ‘making it’ in terms of success may involve behaviors that are not very nice at all. The last quote is one of my all-time favorites.
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It has
always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and
generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants
of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed,
acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of
success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of
the second.
--John
Steinbeck
Guard
well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without
hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.
--George
Sand
I
consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics
generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher
sentiments.
--William
John Wills
Empathy
is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand
that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as
meaningful as your own.
--Barbara
Kingsolver
All the
meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the
hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable, grew, blossomed
and bore fruit in this one word, Hell.
--Robert
Green Ingersoll
False
greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or
at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion
and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is
free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it
loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the
more one admires it.
--Jean
de la Bruyere
In a
lifetime of observing and participating in political debate, I have seen a lot
of meanness.
--Dennis
Prager
Like the
Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude
and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as
gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.
--J. R. Moehringer
Be nice
to those you meet on the way up. They’re the same folks you’ll meet on the way
down.
--Walter
Winchell
