Dwarfs Quotes

Certainly a visitor from Mars descending upon a colony of birth-injured cripples, dwarfs and hunchbacks...could not deduce what they should have been. But then let us not study cripples, but the closest thing we can get to whole, healthy men. In them, we find qualitative differences, a different system of motivation, emotion, value, thinking and perceiving. In a certain sense, only the saints are mankind. All the rest are cripples. ~ Abraham H. Maslow

Remember that when you think you are seeing giants, they may not be giants at all; perhaps it is you who is the dwarf. ~ C. JoyBell C.

For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works. ~ Terry Pratchett

Haughty people seem to me to have, like the dwarfs, the stature of a child and the face of a man. ~ Joseph Joubert

Not nervous, are you?" said Vimes.
"No, sir."
The way he said it jogged something in Vimes's mind.
"No," he said, "you're not, are you? I suppose it's being brought up by the dwarfs that did it. You've got no imagination. ~ Terry Pratchett

If I fight, they must do the same, or they are less than dwarfs. "You won't hear me shout out Joffrey's name," he told them. "You won't hear me yell for Casterly Rock either. This is your city Stannis means to sack, and that's your gate he's bringing down. So come with me and kill the son of a bitch! ~ George R R Martin

I have found that of the Seven Dwarfs, Six are not Happy. ~ Dennis Cogswell

If the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads. ~ Neil Gaiman

You are your mother's trueborn son of Lannister."
"Am I?" the dwarf replied, sardonic. "Do tell my lord father. My mother died birthing me, and he's never been sure."
"I don't even know who my mother was," Jon said.
"Some woman, no doubt. Most of them are." He favored Jon with a rueful grin. "Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs."
And with that he turned and sauntered back into the feast, whistling a tune.
When he opened the door, the light from within threw his shadow clear across the yard, and for just a moment Tyrion Lannister stood tall as a king. ~ George R R Martin

I was a modern young woman, fearless and capable (with mace spray in my robe's right pocket), and I didn't care who knew it. Attitude was everything when dealing with dwarfs. ~ Erik Bundy

One of the dwarfs walked in front of Thor to get a better view of the prye, and Thor kicked him irritably into the middle of the flames, which made Thor feel slightly better and made all the dwarfs feel much worse. ~ Neil Gaiman

The temptation is to insist that black men 'choose' to be criminals; the system does not make them criminals, at least not in the way that slavery made blacks slaves or Jim Crow made them second-class citizens. The myth of choice here is seductive, but it should be resisted. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct. In fact, studies suggest that white professionals may be the most likely of any group to have engaged in illegal drug activity in their lifetime, yet they are the least likely to be made criminals. The prevalence of illegal drug activity among all racial and ethnic groups creates a situation in which, due to limited law enforcement resources and political constraints, some people are made criminals while others are not. Black people have been made criminals by the War on Drugs to a degree that dwarfs its effect on other racial and ethnic groups, especially whites. And the process of making them criminals has produced racial stigma. ~ Michelle Alexander

Remember this, boy. All dwarfs may be bastards, yet not all bastards need be dwarfs ~ George R R Martin

Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall. ~ Paul Davies

From dwarf tossing to drug taking: The legislator has no place in voluntary exchanges between consenting adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these might be. ~ Ilana Mercer

You must not build upon foundations of prayer and contemplation alone, for, unless you strive after the virtues and practice them, you will never grow to be more than dwarfs. ~ Teresa Of Avila

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. ~ David Ogilvy

the most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and jags. The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success.... If contact is allowed, or it cannot be prevented, you indicate the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived. Troy Duster, "Conditions for Guilt-Free Massacre" (1971) ~ Brendan C. Lindsay

You, methinks you think you love me well;
For me, I love you somewhat; rest: and Love
Should have some rest and pleasure in himself,
Not ever be too curious for a boon,
Too prurient for a proof against the grain
Of him ye say ye love: but Fame with men,
Being but ampler means to serve mankind,
Should have small rest or pleasure in herself,
But work as vassal to the larger love,
That dwarfs the petty love of one to one. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

So we believe. Leo has to be alive." "You remember the time in Detroit, when he flattened Ma Gasket with a car engine?" "Or those dwarfs in Bologna. Leo took them down with a homemade smoke grenade made from toothpaste." "Commander Tool Belt," Jason said. "Bad Boy Supreme," Piper said. "Chef Leo the Tofu Taco Expert." They laughed and told stories about Leo Valdez, their best friend. ~ Rick Riordan

This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Racism was not a problem on the DIscworld, because - what with trolls and dwarfs and so on - speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green. ~ Terry Pratchett

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. ~ John Updike

My friendship you shall have, leanred Man," piped Reepicheep. "And any Dwarf
or Giant
in the army who does not give you good language shall have my sword to reckon with. ~ C.S. Lewis

Throughout my academic career, I'd given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in the computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs. ~ Randy Pausch

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. ~ Robinson Jeffers

When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

You'll soon run through the whole of the seven dwarfs. You start dating and it'll be Bashful and Happy you're imitating. Then you start fucking the guy and you'll turn into Sleepy. Then it's just a matter of time before you have a fight and it'll be Grumpy. Then the relationship will be all over and you'll be wiser at the end of it
all, just like Doc."
I shook my head at his convoluted thinking. "What about poor Sneezy?"
Charlie looked at me like I was dumb. "It was an analogy, dude! Work with me here. No analogy is perfect. Just like you're no Snow White and the poor guy you're mooning over is no Prince Charming. ~ Renae Kaye

And when I concentrate on the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty our aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan

An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings. ~ Charlton Laird

If you want to be called a dwarf you must be in immediate possession of a battle axe cause otherwise your just a midget with an attitude. ~ Ralphie May

When people bore me, I close my eyes and try to remember the order the Seven Dwarfs marched in. But it's not always the dwarfs I think about. Sometimes aI try to list all of the Canadian provinces. ~ Stephan Pastis

The drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain. ~ David Foster Wallace

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless. ~ Wallace Stevens

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control. ~ Aaron Copland

Only the person who risks is truly free. A man's conquest of himself dwarfs the conquest of Mt. Everest. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

There's a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There's a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It's so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He's so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he's the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we'll surrender to the sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet. ~ Don DeLillo

Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons; it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

We should extinguish not candles, but torches, my good neighbour; we should fell not shrubs but trees: we should kill one giant instead of ten dwarfs!.. When there is an ostentatious cock crowing all over the place, what is the use of killing one insignificant chick? In a war you have to kill the king first; thus you can put an end to the battle more quickly! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Vimes stared. It was true about the dogs. There didn't seem to be quite so many mooching around these days, and that was a fact. But he'd visited a few dwarf bars with Carrot, and knew that dwarfs would indeed eat dog, but only of they couldn't get rat. And ten thousand dwarfs eating continuously with knife, fork, and shovel wouldn't make a dent in Ankh-Morpork's rat population. It was a major feature in dwarvish letters back home: come on, everyone, and bring the ketchup. ~ Terry Pratchett

Ron, you know full well Harry and I were brought up by Muggles!" said Hermione. "We didn't hear stories like that when we were little, we heard 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' and 'Cinderella' - "
"What's that, an illness?" asked Ron. ~ J.K. Rowling

Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving. ~ Tom Robbins

What sort of gods make rats and plagues and dwarfs? ~ George R R Martin

Dwarfs are very argumentative, sir. Of course, many wouldn't agree. ~ Terry Pratchett

You're tell me those are gnomes pretending to be dwarfs pretending to be elves? Are you trying to play Six Degrees of Bilbo Baggins again? ~ Kevin Hearne

No!" Leo yelled.
"Uhhh," Nico groaned from the floor.
"Piper!" Jason cried.
"Monkey!" Frank yelled.
"Not monkeys," Hazel grumbled. "I think those are dwarfs."
"Stealing my stuff!" Leo yelled, and ran for the stairs. ~ Rick Riordan

A Dwarfe on a Gyants shoulder sees further of the two. [A dwarf on a giant's shoulder sees farther of the two. ~ George Herbert

For example, I'm terribly proud. I'm as mistrustful and as sensitive as a hunchback or a dwarf; but, in truth, I've experienced some moments when if someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I'm being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when you're very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Librarian considered matters for a while. So ... a dwarf and a troll. He preferred both species to humans. For one thing, neither of them were great readers. The Librarian was, of course, very much in favor of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them. He liked people who loved and respected books, and the best way to do that, in the Librarian's opinion, was to leave them on the shelves where Nature intended them to be. ~ Terry Pratchett

There's been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don't think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we've stayed behind.

I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says "understand and respect the universe"… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to "conquer" Earth, to steal their "precious" physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of "competition"… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. "Conquering the galaxy" is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices ~ Greg Egan

At the club, members gathered to peruse these broadsheets, and some approved of the way Karpushka was made to jeer at the French, saying that Russian cabbages will blow them up like balloons, Russian porridge burst their bellies and cabbage-soup finish them off. They are all dwarfs, and one peasant-woman will toss three of them at a time with ~ Leo Tolstoy

How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio's first animated feature, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' premiered in 1937. ~ Richard Corliss

Dwarfs can often do the work of giants when they are transformed by the almost magic power of great mental concentration. ~ William Walker Atkinson

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street. ~ William Hazlitt

Long are the lives of elves' he said.

Short are the tempers of dwarfs,'Gotrek muttered, just loud enough to be heard. ~ William King

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). ~ Matt Ridley

The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambition, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughtered; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménage à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

I have always known that there were spellbinding evil parts for women. For one thing, I was taken at an early age to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never mind the Protestant work ethic of the dwarfs. Never mind the tedious housework-is-virtuous motif. Never mind the fact that Snow White is a vampire
anyone who lies in a glass coffin without decaying and then comes to life again must be. The truth is that I was paralysed by the scene in which the evil queen drinks the magic potion and changes her shape. What power, what untold possibilities! ~ Margaret Atwood

I do not doubt but the majest and beauty of the world are latent
in any iota of the world;
I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects,
vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse than
I have supposed. ~ Walt Whitman

Dwarf mothers didn't handicap their young by teaching them to be polite. My neighbors were as short on manners as they were on stature. ~ Erik Bundy

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarfs), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path. In those days, thank God, I acquired from my master the desire to learn and a sense of the straight way, which remains even when the path is tortuous. ~ Umberto Eco

I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them. ~ Charles De Lint

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generation of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas'd and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.
I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,
Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle."
-from "Song of Myself ~ Walt Whitman

Dinner was a family affair. And oh, how she enjoyed it! Who knew there was so much to talk about each day? She loved when the men shared stories about their work in the mines, while she often regaled them with stories about life in the castle when she was a small child or about the types of birds she spotted from the window. And then there were the questions. She found she had many! After staying silent for so long, there was much she longed to know, and she was always interested in learning more about the men and their lives. She wanted to know who had carved the beautiful wooden doorways and furniture around the cottage, and why the deer and the birds seemed to linger at the kitchen window while she prepped meals.
"They must adore you, as we do," gushed Bashful.
"And I you!" Snow would say. She found she could talk to them till the candle burned out each night.
It felt like she was finally waking up and finding her voice after years of silent darkness. And while she promised the men she would not do more than her share of the housework, she couldn't help trying to find small ways to repay them for their kindness when she wasn't busy strategizing. Despite their protests, she prepared a lunch basket for them to take to work each day. She mended tiny socks. And secretly, she was using yarn and needles she had found to knit them blankets for their beds. It might have been summer, but she couldn't help noticing they had few blankets for the winter months. ~ Jen Calonita

I suppose a human's carriage is a dwarf's bus. ~ Ben Willoughby

We are like dwarfs [the moderns] sitting on the shoulders of giants [the ancients]. Our glance can thus take in more things and reach farther than theirs. It is not because our sight is sharper nor our height greater than theirs; it is that we are carried and elevated by the high stature of the giants. ~ Bernard Of Chartres

The Romans move east from New York. They advance in your camp, and nothing can slow them down.
"Nothing can slow them down," Leo mused. "I wonder..."
"What?" Jason asked.
Leo looked at the dwarfs. "I'll make you a deal."
Akmon's eyes lit up. "Thirty percent?"
"We'll leave you all the treasure," Leo said, "except the stuff that belongs to us, and the astrolabe, and this book, which we'll take back to the dude in Venice."
"But he'll destroy us!" Passolos wailed.
"We won't say where we got it," Leo promised. "And we won't kill you. We'll let you go free."
"Uh, Leo...?" Jason asked nervously.
Akmon squealed in delight. "I knew you were as smart at Hercules! I will call you Black Bottom, the Sequel!"
"You, no thanks," Leo said. "But in return for us sparing your lives, you have to do something for us. I'm going to send you somewhere to steal from some people, harass them, make life hard for them any way you can. You have to follow my directions exactly. You have to swear on the River Styx."
"We swear!" Passalos said. "Stealing from people is our specialty!"
"I love harassment!" Akmon agreed. "Where are we going?"
Leo grinned. "Ever heard of New York? ~ Rick Riordan

No one knows why dwarfs, who at home in the mountains lead quiet, orderly lives, forget it all when they move to the big city. Something comes over even the most blameless iron-ore miner and prompts him to wear chain-mail all the time, carry an ax, change his name to something like Grabthroat Shinkicker and drink himself into surly oblivion. ~ Terry Pratchett

[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing.
The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more accurately, several carrots. Dwarfs liked carrots.
'This is Koboi Labs,' He mumbled around a mouthful of vegetable.
'That?' exclaimed Root.
'I realize, Julius, that it is not an accurate schematic.'
The Commander exploded from his chair. 'An accurate schematic? It's a rectangle for heaven's sake!'
Mulch was unperturbed. 'That's not important. This is the important bit.'
'That wobbly line?'
'It's a fissure,' pouted the dwarf. 'Anybody can see that.'
'Anybody in kindergarten maybe. So it's a fissure, so what?'
'This is the clever bit. Y'see that fissure is not usually there.'
Root began strangling the air again. Something he was doing more and more lately. ~ Eoin Colfer

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned. ~ Alberto Manguel

In gender reconciliation groups, we collectively reach for an unknown power or grace that has a healing potential far beyond our own capabilities or understanding. We invite this power and presence, knowing from experience that something transcendent and universal can and does work through us and it dwarfs our own mechanisms for healing, thinking, fixing, and/or reconstructing what needs to be healed. ~ William Keepin

He invented the Fuse Box Dwarf, a little man who popped out at you from behind the paint cans in the cellarway and screamed, "Dreeb! Dreeb! I am the Fuse Box Dwarf!" Lewis was not scared by the little man, and he felt that those who scream "Dreeb" are more to be pitied than censured. ~ John Bellairs

I believe that every paper in the country should have one headline that when you read it, you laugh so hard you can't stand it. It has to be that way. What about a headline like this: 'Hippo Eats Dwarf'? How good is that? You read that headline, and you immediately close the paper and say, 'Wow, it's gonna be a great day. ~ Lewis Black

The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called. Strategy, probably. Stupid! ... It was, of course, just like German spools to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibenlungen-like. Dwarfs probably! ~ Ford Madox Ford

The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men. In order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes
will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish. ~ John Stuart Mill

Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible.

'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?'

Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

There must have been at least fifty or sixty corners in the main room of the dwarf's house,' the layout artist Tom Codrick lamented, 'because different units were working on the same room and had basic thoughts about what the room was like or the shape of it. ~ Michael Barrier

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service. ~ Wilkie Collins

MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects - really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars). ~ Bill Bryson

Orion nodded, then asked, "Dwarf cheese?"
"Cheese made by dwarfs."
"Oh," said Orion, relieved. "They make it. It's not actually ... "
"No. What a horrible thought."
"Exactly. ~ Eoin Colfer

All dwarfs may be bastards yet not all bastards are dwarfs. ~ George R R Martin

And they made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being unnecessarily cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live. ~ C.S. Lewis

All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional. ~ Terry Pratchett

The U.S. - E.U. economic relationship dwarfs America's economic ties with China. ~ John Bruton

Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog, that steadied him a bit. ~ C.S. Lewis

Man is the dwarf of himself. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

N every culture, the sky and the religious impulse are intertwined. I lie back in an open field and the sky surrounds me. I'm overpowered by its scale. It's so vast and so far away that my own insignificance becomes palpable. But I don't feel rejected by the sky. I'm a part of it - tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. And when I concentrate in the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty out aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan

There was good in seahorses, in yellow dwarfs of destiny, but they are in no way adapted to the requirements of modern life.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) ~ Tom McDonough

The dwarf's eyes widened - at least I think they widened, since they became much more visible in his hairy face - and he froze.
"Would you prefer to retrieve the missive yourself, M'lady Wisp?" he asked.
"I'd rather not," I said. No way was I touching some strange dude's vest, no matter how impressive his beard. ~ E.J. Stevens

This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, this Senior Junior, giant dwarf ... Cupid. ~ William Shakespeare

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be. ~ J.B. Priestley

You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think "oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?" And along with this had come the contrary power, to make things normal. The world changed mightily, and within a few days humans considered it was normal. They had the most amazing ability to shut out and forget what didn't fit. They told themselves little stories to explain away the inexplicable, to make things normal. Historians ~ Terry Pratchett

Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch! ~ Terry Pratchett

He sat back and drank the really horrible tea the dwarfs made. Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling on bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that described something that does not make a noise but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate. ~ Terry Pratchett

The dwarfs can turn lead into gold ... It reached the pointy ears of the dwarfs. -Can we? -Damned if I know. I can't. -Yeah, but if you could, you wouldn't say. I wouldn't say, if I could. -Can you? -No! -Ah-ha! ~ Terry Pratchett

The words 'fairy tales' must accordingly be taken to include tales in which occurs something 'fairy,' something extraordinary - fairies, giants, dwarfs, speaking animals. ~ Joseph Jacobs

Defense, national security, and law enforcement now eat up 34 percent of the Russian budget, more than double the share in 2010. That dwarfs the 18 percent spent by the U.S. last year on defense and national security, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. ~ Anonymous

The children I describe here have horizontal conditions that are alien to their parents. They are deaf or dwarfs; they have Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; they are prodigies; they are people conceived in rape or who commit crimes; they are transgender. The timeworn adage says that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, meaning that a child resembles his or her parents; these children are apples that have fallen elsewhere - some a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world. Yet myriad families learn to tolerate, accept, and finally celebrate children who are not what they originally had in mind. ~ Andrew Solomon

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world's richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV's dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabba ~ Matt Ridley