There’s a lot of wisdom to be found in quotes. They can provide perspective on life, offer advice, and help us to see things in a new light. In this blog post, we will be looking at 100 petty quotes about small-mindedness. These quotes come from a variety of sources, including famous people, comedians, and authors. As you read through them, ask yourself if there is any truth to them. Do you sometimes find yourself being small-minded? If so, these quotes might give you some insight into why that is and how to change it!
Petty Quotes
- “My life is full of drama, and I don’t have time to worry about something as petty as what I look like.” – Adele
- “Don’t be afraid of failure; be afraid of petty success.” – Maude Adams
- “Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound.” – Jan Morris
- “Men are separated by so many petty things.” – Aaron Huey
- “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.” – George Carlin
- “I’ve found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them.” – Marilyn Monroe
- “There’s no room for petty grievances in politics.” – Sergei Lavrov
- “I am very competitive – with myself and everybody else. I’m petty, too.” – Bozoma Saint John
- “Star Trek’ works for me because it deals with the petty issues of humankind.” – Genesis P-Orridge
- “The man of petty ambition if invited to dinner will be eager to be set next his host.” – Theophrastus
- “As the economy goes south, petty theft begins. And then grand theft. And then muggings.” – John McAfee
- “I don’t want to be a politician. I don’t like politics. It’s petty; it fights dirty.” – John Mellencamp
- “Hunger, revenge, to sleep are petty foes, But only death the jealous eyes can close.” – William Wycherley
- “A winner rebukes and forgives; a loser is too timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.” – Sydney J. Harris
- “I get so tired listening to one million dollars here, one million dollars there, it’s so petty.” – Imelda Marcos
- “I’ve seen people get robbed, seen people get shot with my own eyes, for pointless petty crimes.” – Anthony Yarde
- “Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?” – Ivan Turgenev
- “When sports gets involved with petty politics from authorities and co-athletes, it becomes a nasty game.” – P. T. Usha
- “If I would go up on a high note, Eddie would want a low one. That’s how petty the situation had become.” – Sammy Hagar
- “When I was growing up in Salford, I was always in trouble. It was stuff like petty crime and all sorts of things.” – Bez
- “Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.” – Zhuangzi
- “The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.” – Anton Chekhov
- “Divorce is a 50-50 thing, and it can be a number of petty things that finally drive you out of your mind.” – Lee Radziwill
- “Girls, to me, growing up were very, very petty and didn’t want me to succeed and didn’t want the best for me.” – Rachel Zoe
- “Class is considerate of others. It knows that good manners is nothing more than a series of petty sacrifices.” – Ann Landers
- “We should not have a petty regard for God’s gifts, though we may and should despise our own imperfections.” – Saint Ignatius
- “Lindsey Graham can’t lead us in any direction because he traded his moral compass for petty political gain.” – Jaime Harrison
- “Too often, we see wedge politics and petty rhetoric used to belittle adversaries and inflame partisan divisions.” – Larry Hogan
- “I never said finish the Congress, because the opposition is needed… I do not have such petty imaginations.” – Uddhav Thackeray
- “Whether the gentleman is capable or not, he is loved all the same; conversely the petty man is loathed all the same.” – Xun Kuang
- “It’s not that I was not getting offers but I don’t want to do petty and insignificant roles again and again.” – Vishwajeet Pradhan
- “A family on the throne is an interesting idea. It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.” – Walter Bagehot
- “There is more to life than saas bahu issues with women being portrayed as petty characters and their own worst enemies.” – Saba Qamar
- “I have two little boys, and I want them to feel like this is the nation that I know. That this is the nation that isn’t petty.” – Brad Paisley
- “There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.” – Xun Kuang
- “For a long time, I’ve loved the kind of characters who are boastful yet petty. I was originally a gag manga artist, after all.” – Akira Toriyama
- “What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.” – Jerome Charyn
- “The me you see on stage is largely a construct, based on me at my worst, my most annoying, my most petty, and my most patronizing.” – Stewart Lee
- “The petty logic of political parties cannot be allowed to stifle the French people’s legitimate aspirations to safety and liberty.” – Marine Le Pen
- “The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, ‘culture.'” – George Grosz
- “The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.” – Rene Girard
- “I think that the work that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did was truly extraordinary, and that’s their legacy. Not the other petty stuff.” – Ryan Murphy
- “The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.” – John Burroughs
- “When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.” – Jason Fried
- “When politicians don black robes and seize powers they do not have, they should be called out for what they are – usurpers and petty tyrants.” – Pat Buchanan
- “The road to some of the darkest moments of history have been paved with the rants of petty demagogues against ethnic minorities for centuries.” – Bob Menendez
- “It is better to lose everything you have to keep the balance of justice level, than to live a life of petty privilege devoid of true freedom.” – Bryant H. McGill
- “My father was raised with brothers, he was a football player and a boxer, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, he was a man of his times.” – Hillary Clinton
- “When you’re a federal agent you don’t get to arrest people for like $5.00 petty crimes or anything like that, they’ll throw you right out of there.” – Dan Bongino
- “What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.” – Tahar Ben Jelloun
- “Like every other industry or institution, the journalism world is populated by the petty and fearful, in addition to the courageous and brilliant.” – Peter Landesman
- “As leaders, we need to rise above petty politics and lead, rather than follow, the various interests and pressure groups in our respective countries.” – Hassan Rouhani
- “Petty thievery is a more profitable job than pool hustling, which it resembles, requires far less talent and training, and is equally devoid of promise.” – Robert Byrne
- “Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” – Winston Churchill
- “People feel very ashamed to admit that they have in-law problems. They think it’s something petty. But it’s not petty at all. It hits deep emotions.” – Christine Leunens
- “It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.” – W. Somerset Maugham
- “To be able to always have a super sense of who I was and my own real identity and be petty and seem informed and always thinking in thoughts would be great.” – Jeff Goldblum
- “People throughout time have grieved, have fallen in love, have fallen out of love. We are sometimes petty and sometimes heroic, and we have been that way forever.” – Monica Hesse
- “I’m not really good at worrying. I think I get that from my pops. He can be in some really dire straights and be a real optimist, so I don’t sweat the petty stuff.” – Urijah Faber
- “Making dance music is a spiritual thing. It’s about being completely absorbed by rhythm and vibration, so much so that the petty stuff of life stops mattering.” – Sophie Hawley-Weld
- “Please hug your parents while you have them, tell your children how much you love them every second of the day, and don’t let the petty things in life separate you.” – Teresa Giudice
- “I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling.” – Karan Mahajan
- “I did not resign from politics because of Bofors. I resigned because I do not know how to play petty politics. I did not know back then and I don’t know now either.” – Amitabh Bachchan
- “Every man may reign secure in his petty tyranny, and spread terror and desolation around him, until the trump of the Archangel shall excite different emotions in his soul.” – James Otis
- “If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can’t deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.” – Denis Diderot
- “Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.” – Bill Gates
- “If the world’s nations can set aside their petty bickering over religion, politics, and territory, certainly I can ‘get that Olympic Spirit’ and rise above my prejudices.” – Colson Whitehead
- “If we destroy the biosphere, then mankind will die. We all waste our time worrying about stupid wars and petty jealousy and greed, and all the time, we’re sitting on a time bomb.” – Ron Moody
- “The Band was always famous for its retirements; we’d go and play and get a little petty cash together, and then not see each other till it was time to fill our pockets up again.” – Rick Danko
- “Attack The Block’ is an alien invasion film set in South London. It’s about a group of kids who are some petty thugs, who have to find the hero in themselves, when they attack.” – John Boyega
- “Apartheid – both petty and grand – is obviously evil. Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.” – Steven Biko
- “The supposedly petty sexual harassment that so many women have to endure, from Hollywood studios to the factory floor at Ford, is a national outrage that needs to end. Period.” – Bret Stephens
- “No words can describe the personal liberation that heading seaward bestows upon me. In this aquatic realm, no man or woman is subject to the petty decrees of social bureaucracy.” – Paul Watson
- “At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can’t win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.” – John Carmack
- “I liked teaching, but the bureaucracy of academia and the petty intrigue… It wasn’t a good fit. Once I admitted that myself, that I didn’t like academia, I was ready to try TV.” – Nic Pizzolatto
- “Let us be bold enough and free enough to follow the great examples – the men of good will and honor who put aside little ways and petty hatreds to build the American dream.” – Stephen Vincent Benet
- “Your energy, your spirit are important considerations. Feeling petty and frustrated can have reverberating consequences for your ability to think strategically and reach your goals.” – Robert Greene
- “I’ve grown up around that sort of petty crime, getting into trouble and trying to get out of it. What’s funny is my dad was an inspector in the police, so I was known as the grass.” – Michelle Keegan
- “A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.” – Graham Greene
- “Amazon is famously run by studying and responding to its own data; yet when it comes to promotions, decisions are often subjective and guided by human emotions and petty political dynamics.” – Brad Stone
- “The first thing they gave me at ‘Sports Illustrated’ was a first-class air card. ‘And oh, by the way, there’s the petty cash drawer,’ they told me. ‘Take a few thousand dollars for expenses.'” – Dan Jenkins
- “Everything is possible; we just need to be hopeful and think of the world from a human perspective. The world is so small compared to the universe, so we shouldn’t fight for petty things.” – Manal al-Sharif
- “Yes, Operation Block Ivanka was petty. Melania was in on this mission. But in our minds, Ivanka shouldn’t have made herself the center of attention in her father’s inauguration.” – Stephanie Winston Wolkoff
- “It’s a petty thing, but I wouldn’t join the Scouts when I was a kid, ’cause you had to swear allegiance to the queen. I’m just not a royalist. I think it’s idiotic, a hereditary principle.” – Elvis Costello
- “Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.” – Michelle Dean
- “Indulged habits of dependence create habits of indolence, and indolence opens the portal to petty errors, to many degrading habits, and to vice and crime with their attendant train of miseries.” – Dorothea Dix
- “Part of my desire to play music was because I wanted to escape the art world and the politics of it; the petty gossip-y art world. But you know, I feel like they’re both equal forms of expression.” – Kim Gordon
- “We’re not going to pay attention to the silliness and the petty comments. And quite frankly, women have joined me in this effort, and so it’s not about appearances. It’s about effectiveness.” – Katherine Harris
- “The name of the show was ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,’ not ‘Philip and Viv of Bel-Air.’ If you didn’t want to walk away from the best job in the world over a petty issue, you accepted the way it was.” – James Avery
- “Trump’s executive order on refugees, his endless petty feuds – with allies, with judges, with Arnold Schwarzenegger – his constant stream of up-is-down and down-is-up fabrications is outrageous.” – Arianna Huffington
- “In ‘Profiles in Courage,’ my grandfather, John F. Kennedy, praised leadership that put country above party, elevated principles over petty politics and promoted progress before personal interests.” – Jack Schlossberg
- “We’re often ashamed of asking for so much help because it seems selfish or petty or narcissistic, but I think, if there’s a God – and I believe there is – that God is there to help. That’s what God’s job is.” – Anne Lamott
- “Girlhood is often marred by schoolgirl cruelty, a grim rite of passage in which parents sometimes cruelly collude. Mothers and fathers must take a stand against petty or protracted hostility between girls.” – Rachel Simmons
- “If I could tell every Trump supporter two things, it would be to travel and read a history book. Look beyond yourselves; look at how petty the morals you uphold seem when you realize we are not the only ones.” – Lauren Jauregui
- “I’m trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there’s all that baggage: What’s beautiful about humans is what’s balanced by what’s kind of ugly and petty and depressing.” – Lynn Coady
- “The Hindu marriage may be described as the union of two families. In this union, there is no room for petty ambitions and personal ego-trips. What is involved is love for the entire family that one is marrying into.” – Dada Vaswani
- “Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.” – Giles Coren
- “I think standing and fighting and working alongside all of these people that raise their right hand and serve their nation… really wipes away the distractions of some of the petty things we think are important at home.” – Pete Hegseth
- “It’s funny, I often think about how, if we were all placed in an apocalyptic situation, you’d realize quickly how stupid, petty things just don’t matter anymore. Who you love is who you love, and it doesn’t matter.” – Alycia Debnam-Carey
- “We’re quick to complain about racism, sexism, homophobia, but it’s not as bad as people make out. If we’re going to be more cohesive, we have to be more relaxed about petty incidents and not find insult where none exists.” – Kemi Badenoch
Wrapping Up
These 100 petty quotes about being small-minded show just how destructive this mindset can be. From ruining relationships to derailing careers, a small-minded person often causes more harm than good. Hopefully, these quotes will inspire you to think twice before acting out of spite or jealousy. After all, it’s not worth sacrificing your happiness for someone else’s momentary satisfaction.
