Pygmies Quotes & Sayings

This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way. — John Knowles

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day.
Then I knew what the problem was.
I needed experience.
How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing? — Sylvia Plath

The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market. — William O. Douglas

It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant;
the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless and absolved of mortality
old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons. — William Faulkner

We are all giants, raised by pygmies, who have learned to walk with a perpetual mental crouch. — Robert Anton Wilson

The Pygmies and the Bushmen, these oldest of all peoples, remind us that our capacities for mutuality, cooperation, and empathy are every bit as real and every bit as much a part of our humanity as our capacities for greed, competition, and exclusiveness. Raising their children with unlimited respect and treating each person as having infinite worth, they have survived longer than any other culture known to science. — John Robbins

You know, Balzac once described bureaucracy as a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." "What'd your buddy Balzac have to say about inadmissible evidence?" "Not a lot. I think he considered the subject beneath him. — Craig Johnson

He was vain and tended to surround himself with intellectual and moral pygmies. — Stephen L. Carter

At last, I came to the Lost Dog's Home which my map told me marked teh turnoff to Shelly Beach.
You could hear some of the dogs barking, calling out for their owners to come and get them away from there ...
I hated going to those places because I always wanted to take all the dogs home or let them go free, even though I knew most of them would go straight out and be hit by a car or starve to death. I sometimes wished I could have a place where I could take those dogs and let them live. The Phantom had this sanctuary called Eden and all the animals there lived together, even tigers and baby deer, because they'd never learned it's kill or be killed. The maneaters ate fish out of the lagoon and the island was protected by the Bandar poison pygmies and by the piranha fish in the lagoon. I would have liked there to be such a place for pets who had been dumped of abandoned. They could feed the owners to the piranha. — Isobelle Carmody

Tom." Mrs. Sprye's tone was severe. "I expect you to look after this boy, not encourage him to go about brawling in the street. In broad daylight!"
Tom was stung. "It's nigh impossible to brawl in the dark, Mrs. Sprye. And look - " He put his hands on Trumpet's shoulders and turned him full circle. "Scarcely a scratch on him. A bit dirty, true, but I believe that Pygmies can be washed. — Anna Castle

Well, honey, what Mrs. Pike liked was the pygmies. They've got these pygmies down there, too, an' Mrs. Pike was just wild about 'em. You know, the teeniniest men in the universe? Well, honey, they can just rest back on their little bohunkus an' roll around an' you can't hardly tell if they're sittin' or standin'. That'll give you some idea. They're about forty-two years old. Just suppose it was your husband!'
("Petrified Man") — Eudora Welty

Some missionaries are giants in the Spirit and pygmies in skills in the Spirit. Work hard to develop a balance. Your leaders, and you, should teach the skills to each other. — Richard G. Scott

Politically speaking, ours is an age of the pygmies. — Tony Judt

Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins. — Henry David Thoreau

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. — Honore De Balzac

Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps; And pyramids are pyramids in vales. Each man makes his own stature, builds himself. Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids; Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall. — Edward Young

Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory - the world? Then we pygmies must be content to have out paper allegories but ill comprehended. — Herman Melville

The aspiring efforts of genius, or virtue, either in active or speculative life, are measured, not so much by their real elevation, as by the height to which they ascend above the level of their age and country; and the same stature, which in a people of giants would pass unnoticed, must appear conspicuous in a race of pygmies. — Edward Gibbon

He felt a giant among pygmies, a pike among crappies, as he stood there among the legislators, most of whom owed him for flavors - special bills passed for their law clients, state jobs for constituents, " contributions" for their personal campaign funds, and so on. — A.J. Liebling

Each man forms his duty according to his predominant characteristic; the stern require an avenging judge; the gentle, a forgiving father. Just so the pygmies declared that Jove himself was a pygmy. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We are being programmed by mental pygmies. — Howard Hesseman

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies. — Lester B. Pearson

There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past. — Anonymous

[Albert] Schweitzer thus carved out his own path through the first half of this century, a lonely and learned giant amidst the hordes of noisy and shallow theological pygmies. — N. T. Wright

The Pygmies rely on the forest for their very life. They know everything about finding and using plants, animal behavior, and forest survival. Working with these wonderful people has been incredibly valuable. — Corneille Ewango

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies. — Basil O'Connor

We make no saint of Thomas Jefferson - we leave the mindless business of canonization and the worship of humans to the fanatics - but aware as we are of his many crimes and contradictions we say with confidence that his memory and example will endure long after the moral pygmies who try to blot out his name have been forgotten. — Christopher Hitchens

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin. — Winston Churchill

Each culture has some knowledge. That's why I studied with Saj Dev, an Indian flute player. That's why I studied Stockhausen's music. The pygmies' music of the rain forest is very rich music. So the knowledge is out there. And I also believe one should seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. With that kind of inquisitiveness, one discovers things that were unknown before. — Yusef Lateef

Men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. — Emma Goldman