It Not Easy Being Mean Quotes & Sayings

If you could just be nice, then you wouldn't have to worry about arguments at all. but being nice wasn't as easy as it seemed, especially when the rest of the world could be so mean. — Sarah Dessen

Magazines devoted to the religion of success appear as Makers of America. They mean just about that when they preach evolution, progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the idea confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature with contraption. Yet the same motives are at work which have ever actuated any moral code, or ever will. The desire fir the biggest, the fastest, the highest, or if you are a maker of wristwatches or microscopes the smallest; the love in short of the superlative and the "peerless," is in essence and possibility a noble passion. — Walter Lippmann

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The working of miracles is old and out-dated; to teach the people is too laborious; to interpret scripture is to invade the prerogative of the schoolmen; to pray is too idle; to shed tears is cowardly and unmanly; to fast is too mean and sordid; to be easy and familiar is beneath the grandeur of him, who, without being sued to and intreated, will scarce give princes the honour of kissing his toe; finally, to die for religion is too self-denying; and to be crucified as their Lord of Life, is base and ignominious. — Erasmus

It's easy to romanticize the people in our lives that mean something to us. We elevate them onto a higher plane that the rest of humanity. They appear glorious and pristine and full of wonders of the Universe all wrapped up into one person-sized box waiting to be unpacked. It's easy to forget, when they appear perfect in every way and in every facet of their lives with every action they take, in the end they are still human. And we duly forget being human comes with an inherent composition of flaws in our genetic and mental make-up. — August Clearwing

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing. — Sheena Iyengar

Link is a quiet man to meet- easy and courteous. His music, though, betrays that deep inside he gets very very mean very often. I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard Rumble , and yet very excited by the guitar sound. And his voice! He sounds like a cross between Jagger and Van Morrison, even sometimes like Robbie Robertson. We met him in New York in 1970 while recording Who's Next ... this later inspired the b-side Wasp Man, a tune we dedicated to Link Wray. — Pete Townshend

In my opinion humanity is being prayed upon, I mean as a species. Not only by old satanic families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, Collins, Dupont, Warner, Russell, the world's monarchies, the Vatican. But also prayed upon by these family's employees, by governments, by the military, by banking institutions, by academia. So who does that leave? That's all the people who aren't wealthy, aren't connected, aren't educated, who are easy to manipulate, are easy to persecute and who don't believe any of the issues which you cover on Red Ice. And that's a problem. And that breaks my heart. — Sean Young

And I guess that's when I decided being good at something didn't mean you had to do it. Just 'cause something's easy doesn't make it right. — Julie Murphy

Just because I've been gone from this country for most of my life doesn't mean I understand it any less. When I was fifteen I left Jamaica. I knew that I was a lesbian then and, because of what I looked like, I was an out lesbian. It was hard for me. It was hard for the thirteen years I was in England, for various reasons, and it's going to be difficult here as well. I don't anticipate anything being easy. But I'd rather suffer the chance of someone accosting me for being a dyke than suffer the emotional violence I'd do to myself if I wasn't honest about who I am. — Fiona Zedde

There are fourteen keys to experiencing greater love and with each key, I offer what I believe to be the most effective tool out there. So this is a time when, if we're awake to it, we have an amazing opportunity to start living a different life. By that I mean the life that our souls came here to live. We're all being propelled forward and it's not always easy, but through supporting one another we can do it. — Marci Shimoff

Fans and friends are considered family. Being an A7X fan isn't always easy because it means you're not only gonna laugh with us, but cry with us and defend us on occasion. If you're part of the family it's for life. — Zacky Vengeance

It's not easy being an actor, and having said that, everybody's an actor. Do you know what I mean? Paris Hilton's an actor, which is kind of scary. But if you want to honor your craft and yourself, strive for the nobler instincts. — Patti LuPone

Certain money is not always good money. It could be just being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, if you have your priorities in check then for the most part it's easy. — LeBron James

The years were never an element, because my parents didn't age, they simply sickened. My father was mean and cocky like Cagney all the way to the dump. Flat on his back, his bones poking this way and that like the corpses in the camps, he still had a fiery eye, as though, but for those two coals, the grate held ash. There's no easy way out of this life, and I do not look forward to the day they put those tubes up my nose, and a catheter shows my pee the way out like some well-trained servant. I saw how my father's body broke his spirit like a match; and I saw how my mother's broken spirit took her body under the way a ship stinks after being disemboweled by an errant bag of ice. — William H Gass

I don't do well with being threatened. And I definitely don't take orders. But you'll learn all this. Eventually. I get that I know you better than you know yourself, but there's a few things you should know about me. And I'll make it easy for you." Mimicking my pointing to my fingers, he points to his index finger. "Number one, you'll be here because you want to be here, not because I forced you. Ever." Pointing to his middle finger, "Number two, this closet is yours, and I expect you to use whatever is in there, down to your drawers." Pointing back to his index finger, "Number three, you're so fucking hot when you get worked up that I would really like for you to suck my cock. And when I say I would really like that, I mean suck my cock, Lexi. Now. — Belle Aurora

There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.'
'What's that supposed to mean?' I asked.
'That the good that will come is not always obvious. Nor easy to see. Nor in the place we would expect to find it. Nor what we personally desire. You should consider that the good being created by the events this night may have nothing to do with the defeat of supernatural evils or endangered lives. It may be something very quiet. Very ordinary. — Jim Butcher

And there are certain things, and they are evident, obviously, without being boring about it, but I mean obviously, the two evident and easy ones being Gandhi and Cry Freedom, there are things which I do care about very much and which I would like to stand up and be counted. — Richard Attenborough

Thinking that being a good, decent, respectable person will mean that others will see you as weak, vulnerable, and easy to manipulate. — Paulo Coelho

I don't deny that impulse drew us together, but while physical gratification began and ended it for you, in making love, dumbo here - - ' she jerked a thumb at her chest ' - was also demonstrating that she cared.'
His tongue moistened his lips. 'You're very up-front, aren't you?'
'You mean none of your other rejects have ever looked you in the eye and complained?' Sian queried. She might have made things easy last night, but she refused to make anything easy for him now. 'I suppose you'd prefer it if I shrugged my shoulders, muttered something about it being nice while it lasted, and filed the experience away under lessons learned? Well, sorry, but for me, and for most women if they're honest, going to bed with someone is a darn sight more complicated than that! — Elizabeth Oldfield

Being a Christian does not exempt us from tough training, which may mean suffering. If the training were easy, we would not be prepared for the tough days ahead. — Billy Graham

"Why is the creative entrepreneur the riskiest type to be?" I asked. "Because being creative means you are often a pioneer. It is easy to copy a successful and proven product. It is also less risky. If you learn to innovate, create, or invent your way to success, you are an entrepreneur creating new value rather than an entrepreneur who wins by copying." — Robert Kiyosaki

You've heard all about me. I may sound desperate and tragic. But i'm not. The bit about me being single is true, but that doesn't mean I'm easy pickings or that I'm going to fall in to bed with the first man who buys me a cappuccino. Especially if he's married.
She felt dizzy with the effort of being so upfront — Eleanor Prescott

To be an actor you need various things. You need to have a head for choosing the roles. You have to be, hopefully, easy to work with so people enjoy working with you. You have to deal with missing roles, with not being asked to work, with doing good work and then being castigated by the critics for it. You have to have a skin that can deal with all of that. I, fortunately, seem to have the makeup which allows me to deal with the business. I mean, not as everybody. — Jeremy Irons

They say being in love and loving someone are two different things, right? I mean, you love your best friend, but you love your husband, right? Falling in love with someone is easy. It's loving when the newness has worn off, when life gets tough, when things get in the way, when physical passion is gone, that true love remains. When love can conquer it all. — Mia Asher

Sometimes it's easy to see the negative side of things or question why people bully you. You could think, 'Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm not worth it. Maybe I should just quit.' But that's when you should fight the hardest. Now I don't mean fight physically, but mentally. Keep being you. — Raini Rodriguez

If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren't so hard anymore. Therefore, I listed what I had learned: 1. It's easy to forget that people can think you think what you don't think. 2. Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't. 3. A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both. — Gloria Steinem

He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled. — Willa Cather

No mean person is mean all the time. The whole point of being mean is to fluctuate so that you can hold out the hope for someone. So someone will hold out the hope that they're gonna catch you on the sunny side or that you're gonna be nice this time. The tyranny is inconsistency. Somebody thats consistently mean is something that is pretty easy to sort out. The reality is that the meanest people can be wonderful sometimes. That's the whole point of meanness because otherwise it's too obvious. It's the niceness that gets you trapped in the dysfunction. That is the problem and so the fact that you have this belief that there is hope in the relationship is foundational to the dysfunction. — Stefan Molyneux

have never come across a coherent notion of bad or good, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable that did not depend upon some change in the experience of conscious creatures. It is not always easy to nail down what we mean by "good" and "bad" - and their definitions may remain perpetually open to revision - but such judgments seem to require, in every instance, that some difference register at the level of experience. Why would it be wrong to murder a billion human beings? Because so much pain and suffering would result. Why would it be wrong to painlessly kill every man, woman, and child in their sleep? Because of all the possibilities for future happiness that would be foreclosed. If you think such actions are wrong primarily because they would anger God or would lead to your punishment after death, you are still worried about perturbations of consciousness - albeit ones that stand a good chance of being wholly imaginary. — Sam Harris

Locke's essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree, as one of the virtues of a liberal society. But many who call themselves liberal today seem to have little understanding of what this virtue really is. Toleration does not mean renouncing all opinions that others might find offensive. It does not mean an easy-going relativism or a belief that 'anything goes'. On the contrary, it means accepting the right of others to think and act in ways of which you disapprove. It means being prepared to protect people from negative discrimination even when you hate what they think and what they feel. But — Roger Scruton

NAUGHTY AND NICE? said Death. BUT IT'S EASY TO BE NICE IF YOU'RE RICH. IS THIS FAIR?
Albert wanted to argue. He wanted to say, Really? In that case, how come so many of the rich buggers is bastards? And being poor don't mean being naughty, neither. — Terry Pratchett

People talk about being godlike, or godly... like those mean something. Like that means anything.
Like those are hard to do.
Being God is easy, just sit there and don't do anything.
I've always felt best when I could get away with being the Devil. — Justin Skrakowski

Cricket: NO. I mean, yes, but ... sometimes there are ... extenuating circumstances. That prevent it from being easy. For a while. But then people overcome those ... circumstances and ...

Lola: So you believe in second chances?

Cricket: Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right.

Lola: If the person is ... Lola?

Cricket: Only if the other person is Cricket. — Stephanie Perkins

Well, I mean I have forgotten how to go anywhere alone. There are things you have to do. Like throw money into a toll basket on a highway. I'd pull up to it now and panic. Or what if I had to hail a cab? It's hard to believe, but I used to be able to do things when I was twenty that are impossible now [ ... ] It's more than the physical task. It's ... a vision of yourself. If you don't see yourself as being able to do it, then you can't, no matter how easy it is. — Josephine Humphreys

It is easy enough to vote right and be consistently with the majority. But it is more often more important to be ahead of the majority and this means being willing to cut the first furrow in the ground and stand alone for a while if necessary. — Patsy Mink

Lola: Do you think things have to be easy? For it to work?
Cricket: NO. I mean, yes, but ... sometimes there are ... extenuating circumstances. That prevent it from being easy. For a while. But then people overcome those ... circumstances ... and ...
Lola: So you believe in second chances?
Cricket: Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right. — Stephanie Perkins

How did you know? That she wasn't the one for him?" Now he's staring at his hands, slowing rubbing them together. "They just didn't have that ... natural magic. You know? It never seemed easy."
My voice grows tiny. "Do you think things have to be easy? For it to work?"
Cricket's head shoots up, his eyes bulging as they grasp my meaning. "NO. I mean, yes, but ... sometimes there are ... extenuating circumstances. That prevent it from being easy. For a while. But then people overcome those ... circumstances ... and ... "
"So you believe in second chances?" I bite my lip.
"Second, third, fourth. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. If the person is right," he adds.
If the person is ... Lola?"
This time, he holds my gaze. "Only if the other person is Cricket."
Chapter 27
Pg 273 — Stephanie Perkins

Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so there is no longer a split in the soul ... For the person of integrity, life may not be easy but it is simple: Figure out what is right and do it. All other considerations come in second. — Harold S. Kushner

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other's imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes - hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways - and that's okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we're all these incredibly fragile beings. — Alain De Botton

I see what you mean. It must be a huge relief, and an easy way out, to think the devil is always outside of us. ( ... ) we would stop looking for Sheitan outside and instead focus on ourselves. What we need is sincere self-examination. Not being on the watch for the faults of others. (p. 257). — Elif Shafak