Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up?
Sean CoveyTags: jealousy gossip pettiness
Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.
Christopher HitchensTags: politics friendship united-states television journalism new-york betrayal mother-teresa london england bill-clinton oxford argumentation 1990s the-guardian the-new-republic pettiness presidency-of-bill-clinton sidney-blumenthal diana-princess-of-wales martin-walker-reporter marty-peretz nightline university-of-oxford
But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Friedrich NietzscheTags: pettiness
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.
Tags: wwii evil war civilization good resentment jews nazis barbarism ordinariness pettiness denunciation
Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.
Christopher HitchensTags: tyranny law 2004 cars big-government pettiness car-alarms mayoralty-of-michael-bloomberg michael-bloomberg
Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.
Sebastian FaulksChickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.
Paul FussellTags: war military pettiness chickenshit
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 SontagTags: success greatness equality democracy ambition jealousy ideals heroes essence glory achievement perfection mediocrity intimidation inferiority pettiness egalitarianism overachievers
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. TepperTags: life fate religion punishment chance curse superstition destiny fortune luck misfortune pettiness divine-intervention
You don't have to knock anyone off their game to win yours. It doesn’t build you up to tear others down.
Mandy HaleTags: kindness love confidence making-a-difference positivity positive-thinking kind insecurity negativity pettiness being-mean hurting-people helping-people be-the-change setting-an-example being-loving being-a-positive-person being-the-bigger-person build-people-up build-you-up building-people-up speaking-hope speaking-life tear-your-down
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