"Small-minded" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mother's appeal, though it should not be altogether ignored, was an insincere one. She had always stood by the men of the family; and for the men of the family, Gertrude, its eldest daughter, felt nothing but loathing and contempt. Her father, a local government official in a western town, a small-minded domestic tyrant, ruined by long years of whisky-nipping between meals; her only brother, profligate and spendthrift, of whose present modes of life the less said the better; her brother-in-law, Henry Lewison, the man whom, in her callow, ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... noticeable insistency, he shook his head and distorted the features of his face until he resembled an irritated ape. It was the peasant spirit of defiance in him that made him act this way. He nourished a measure of small-minded anxiety lest he be indebted to somebody for something. To temptations, yielding to which would have been spiritually mortifying, he was impervious. When, consequently, his need became overpowering, he simply ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... his narrow skull; the scowling features; the ragged penthouse brows; are 'close denotements' of the truth of 'Common Report.' In short, judging from the much-bepraised 'likeness' to which we allude, if Sir HUDSON LOWE was not a tyrant, and a small-minded one withal, GOD doesn't write a legible hand. . . . SOME clever wag in the last BLACKWOOD has an article, written in a hurry, upon the hurriedness of literary matters in these our 'go-ahead' days. 'People,' he says, 'have not only ceased to purchase ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... Raphael or a prince took pleasure in a statuette of Cellini. The prince paid for the statuette; but he did not expect the statuette to pay him. It is my impression that no cake of soap can be found anywhere in the cartoons which the Pope ordered of Raphael. And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism of our plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience, can doubt that the artist-advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over which he will have no moral ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... a small community are apt to put two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old lawyer ninety-five ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... blunders, from which the regimental sergeant-major pulled him with a loyal soul and a shut mouth. Slovens and incompetents raged against him; the weak-minded strove to lure him from the ways of justice; the small-minded—yea, men whom Cottar believed would never do "things no fellow can do"—imputed motives mean and circuitous to actions that he had not spent a thought upon; and he tasted injustice, and it made him very sick. But his consolation came on parade, ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... seem arid and a dissertation upon Italian painting colorless—if it were possible to conceive Grenville as wasting time or thought on such trifles—added no grace to the exposition of a fiscal measure or charm to the formality of a phalanx of figures. He was gloomy, dogged, domineering, and small-minded. His nearest approach to a high passion was his worship of economy; his nearest approach to a splendid virtue was his stubborn independence. He abandoned Pitt for Bute because he detested Pitt's prodigal policy, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... official. A man of genius might possibly have managed the inhabitants of his Alsatia. But governments have no right to expect genius in unsupported officials—even when they pay them L300 a year. Mr. Busby was a well-meaning, small-minded person, anxious to justify his appointment. His Alsatians did not like him, and complained that his manners were exclusive and his wit caustic. Probably this meant nothing more than that he declined to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... been said that by reason of writing so much about snobs that Thackeray came to see snobbishness where there was none. But certain it is he laid a smart but kindly finger on many a small-minded prejudice. Several times in this book you have heard of sizars and commoners, stupid distinctions which are happily now done away with. Perhaps you would like to know what Thackeray thought of them. For although it is not a very good illustration of real snobbishness, it is interesting ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall |
