Little Man Quotes

Most of us inherit one shame or another. [...] I met a guy named Mike during my travels in Alaska. We've stayed in touch. He's blond and blue-eyed, and does not fit comfortably in most chairs and beds because he's six foot nine. He's often embarrassed by his height and sometimes tells people he's six foot eight. He stoops on purpose. Once, while waiting to be seated at a restaurant, he and I stood in front of a full-length mirror. His reflection wasn't all there. His head was cut off. There were so many ways to be invisible. ~ Alex Tizon

You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral. ~ Edith Sitwell

Now, no complaining, Waxillium. It will help. I've put the list in this little book," Steris said, producing a palm-sized notebook, "for ease of reference. Each page contains a conversation opener, indexed to the people it will likely work best upon. The numbers below list ways you could segue the conversation into useful areas and perhaps figure out what our targets are up to, and what their connection is to the Bands of Mourning."
"I'm not socially incompetent, Steris," Wax said. "I can make small talk."
"I know that," Steris said, "but I'd rather avoid an incident like the Cett party. ... "
"Which Cett party?"
"The one where you head-butted someone."
He cocked his head. "Oh, right. That smarmy little man with the ridiculous mustache. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Ten days later I was amazed to receive a letter from Diana written just days after she'd arrived home--in fact, before I'd written her a thank-you letter. I was mortified by my delay in writing to her. I had managed to fire off proper thank-you notes to Ambassador Wight and Ms. Gillett, but I had so much more to say to Diana.
Her letter was the most heartwarming one I have ever received--even more so, now that I know what personal strain she was under then. After thanking us "a million times" for coming to see them in Washington, she wrote, "From the beginning to the end I had a lump in my throat looking at what a special little man Patrick had grown up to be--Goodness, you must be extremely proud of him and if either of my boys turn out like Patrick I will have no worries and I really mean every word." I had a lump in my throat as I read this. I was very proud of Patrick and deeply touched by Diana's praise.
Diana added that, for her, the high point of the visit to Washington was seeing Patrick and me. She explained, "Being able to get in touch with a v. happy and memorable part of my past meant a tremendous amount to me and kept me going for days!" Seeing the world-famous Diana in such a warm and personal way after five years and realizing how much she still cherished our friendship kept me going for months, even years! ~ Mary Robertson

You are linked to the ground mechanic's careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There's nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother's womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world. ~ Ian Fleming

By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man. ~ Maria Montessori

He was not the Empire - not every moment of oppression and indignity and torment she had ever suffered. He was an Imperial, a petty, spiteful, scared little man who'd forgotten his own atrocities. ~ Alexander Freed

Little Man turned around and watched saucer-eyed as a bus bore down on him spewing clouds of red dust like a huge yellow dragon breathing fire. Little Man headed toward the bank, but it was too steep. He ran frantically along the road looking for a foothold and, finding one, hopped onto the bank, but not before the bus had sped past enveloping him in a scarlet haze while laughing white faces pressed against the bus windows. Little ~ Mildred D. Taylor

When relatives asked, "How is your life in America?" my father would answer, Nandito pa rin kami. We're still here. ~ Alex Tizon

We want to be, when we are young, A little man. I would like to be a big child, Stronger and fairer than a man, And more lucid than a child. ~ Paul Eluard

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived ~ Pat Barker

Must! Is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, little man! Thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word. ~ Elizabeth I

Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murderer is very thin, a poor sap, how he came to do it, you shouldn't have thought it of him. Shot may be, someone suggests. Of course, everyone heard the shot. Three streets off, the shot had been heard. Not a bit of it, that was a motor tyre. No, it was a shot! The crowd won't be done out of its shot. A threatening attitude is assumed towards the doubters. Don't let him go. An accessory. Trying to confuse the trail! Out of the building comes more news. The woman's statements are revised. The thin man has been murdered. And the corpse on the floor? It's alive. It's the murderer, he had hidden himself. He was tring to creep away between the corpse's legs when he was caught. The more recent information is more detailed. The little man is a dwarf. What do you expect, a cripple! The blow was actually struck by another. A redheaded man. Ah, those redheads. The dwarf put him up to it. Lynch him! The woman gave the alarm. Cheers for the woman! She screamed and screamed. A Woman! Doesn't know what fear is. The murderer had threatened her. The redhead. It's always the Reds. He tore her collar off. No shooting. Of course not. What did he say? Someone must have invented the shot. The dwarf. Where is he? Inside. Rush the doors! No one else can get in. It's full up. What a murder! The woman had a platef ~ Elias Canetti

One morning when he was about thirteen, Den and I were in the barn doing the before-breakfast chores. I was in the milking stall, Den in the driveway.
He must have been thinking about Maury, for after a while he said, "Dad, Maury Telleen is not very tall. Did you ever notice that?"
"Yes," I said. And probably I was about to tell him he should mind his manners, but he wasn't finished.
He said, "But you never think of him as a little man. Did you ever notice that?"
"Yes," I said. "I have noticed that. ~ Wendell Berry

The strong man wants to be allowed to DO; the little man wants to stop him. ~ Theodore Dreiser

I felt sorry for this little man with the big name as he strutted his stuff, feeding hungrily off the adoration he saw in others' eyes. For all his funniness, he seemed to me very sad. ~ Sue Ellen Browder

Why not? If you're not going to let me see you naked, we might as well be girlfriends."
"You're a twisted little man."
"Come on, Stretch, share with the class."
"No!" I laughed.
"Prude."
"Perv."
"Schoolmarm."
"Some other word that essentially means perv. ~ Molly Harper

When running a Ponzi scheme, how does one avoid enormous, unexpected withdrawals - runs on the bank, so to speak - that would pull back the curtain and reveal a little man blowing smoke? One way would be to attract a core of investors who could be counted on to never withdraw more than a small percentage of principal each year. ~ Mitchell Zuckoff

Our common status made talk easier. [...] She knew the paradox of being stared at and not seen. She knew what it felt like to walk out of a movie theater feeling ashamed or erased. ~ Alex Tizon

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at lenght, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can be hardly expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized.But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralisation of power.
As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive - and so less available to the eterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has grobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State - that is to say, by small group of party leaders and soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. ~ Aldous Huxley

Some who were not yet ready to venture into the chapel on Sundays might well put in their first appearance on a Saturday night to see what Y dyn bach ('the little man') had got to say. (The Welsh term has an element of affection in it not obvious in the English) ~ Iain H. Murray

He's not dead," I spoke up. "The last we heard, he still lived."

"He did?" Simus asked, then let his eyes slide over to Keir. "Losing your touch?"

A cry of outrage filled the tent. I grabbed at the blanket, as Keir stood, sword in hand. Simus had two daggers that appeared from nowhere. I looked at the privy entrance, to see Marcus standing there, waving my underthings in his fist and shaking them in the air. "Where did the likes of these come from?"

I jumped up and grabbed for them, but that scarred little man dodged me. "Those are mine!" I made another attempt, darting around the bed. Simus roared out his laughter and Keir got out of the way.

Marcus danced away again. "The Warprize accepts nothing, except at the hand of the Warlord!" His face was bright red, the scarring a dull white against it.

"Give me those!" I went after him again and this time managed to wrestle the cloth from his hand. Flushed and breathless, I shoved them behind my back and faced down Marcus, toe to toe. "You have no business - "

"Nothing, except at the hand of the Warlord!" Marcus roared out, spittle flying from his mouth.

"You bragnect! I bought them with his coin!"

Marcus blinked. Apparently it was an effective curse in their language, since it seemed to leave him speechless. His recovery was quick. "Could have asked Hisself or I."

I rolled my eyes, just imagining that conversation. ~ Elizabeth Vaughan

Evil itself is a dictator, whether it's dressed up like a pompous little man with a moustache, or a bunch of faceless terrorists, or a fundamentalist state. That's what the devil is, you know. And it's precious difficult to combat. Or rather, it's not so much difficult, as demanding of great courage. Will, and wit. ~ Chico Kidd

Learn on how little man may live, and how small a portion nature requires. ~ Lucan

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' m ~ Wilhelm Reich

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folk-ishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. Tailor ~ Milton Sanford Mayer

The little man with beard and glasses leaped up. 'There's nobody here has anything to do with governments! We're all good people! ~ Philip K. Dick

Young people who would have had no natural ties in Asia found themselves bound together in America, and more so with succeeding generations. The farther out in time from the point of arrival, the more Asian they became. It mirrored what happened to Africans brought to America as slaves. "We may have all come on different ships," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "but we're in the same boat now. ~ Alex Tizon

The world is plain rotten. People are mean, they're cruel, they're fake, they always pretend to be something their not. They're weak. They take advantage. A cruddy little man who sees God in a snake, or the devil in thunder, will take you prisoner if he gets the drop on you. Give anyone half a chance and he'll make you a slave; he'll tell you the most awful lies. I've seen them, running around bollocky, playing God. And our friends... they'll be lonely out there. They'll be scared. Because the world stinks. ~ Paul Theroux

You're more than that," said the Scarecrow, in a grieved tone; "you're a humbug." "Exactly so!" declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. "I am a humbug. ~ L. Frank Baum

Big fish eats small fish; oceans need revolution! Big man beats little man; world needs revolution! Big galaxies swallow little galaxies; universe needs revolution! Anything which is not ethical needs a strong revolution! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him. ~ Sojourner Truth

Can you tell me which is yours?" Standing at Bird's side, the nurse spoke as if she were addressing the father of the hospital's healthiest and most beautiful baby. But she wasn't smiling, she didn't even seem sympathetic; Bird decided this must be the standard intensive care ward quiz. Not only the nurse who had asked the question but two young nurses who were rinsing baby bottles beneath a huge water heater on the far wall, and the older nurse measuring powdered milk next to them, and the doctor studying file cards at a cramped desk against the smudgy poster-cluttered wall, and the doctor on this side of him, conversing with a stubby little man who seemed, like Bird, to be the father of one of the seeds of calamity gathered here - everybody in the room stopped what he was doing and turned in expectant silence to look at Bird. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

A month before the Treasure Fleet's maiden voyage, at the age of thirty-four, Zheng He commissioned an epitaph inscribed on a stone pillar over his father's grave in Yunnan province. He worshiped his father, who had died in battle. The epitaph, one of only three known testimonials from the admiral, described his father's character:

'He was content as an ordinary commoner, but he was brave and decisive in his ordinary life. There was no one in this community who did not look up to him. When he encountered the unfortunate, including widows, orphans, and others with no one to rely on, he routinely offered protection and aid. He cherished the bestowal of extraordinary favours. By nature, he was fond of doing good.'

This revelation of a softer version of manhood as the ideal in much of Asia provided another piece of the answer to the question of how Westerners came to perceive Asians as less masculine. ~ Alex Tizon

Amazon.com took the idea of a man inside the computer and created a service with the same name. A person or company can present a task to the Mechanical Turk Web site, and hordes of invisible people will chip away at it, doing work that's eerily human but requires no personal interaction and very little money. These hardworking people are like the little man inside the chess computer: you can't see them, but they're doing all the work. ~ Seth Godin

The little man is still a man. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Father Adam!"
But the little man said nothing, did nothing. He stood still holding the letter, and there was not even a change of expression in his face; and this might be, thought Jocelin, because he has no face at all. He is the same all round like the top of a clothespeg. He spoke, laughing down at the baldness with its fringe of nondescript hair.
"I ask your pardon, Father Adam. One forgets you are there so easily!" And then, laughing aloud in joy and love - "I shall call you Father Anonymous! ~ William Golding

There was a little man, and he had a little soul; And he said, Little Soul, let us try, try, try! ~ Charles Lamb

At that moment, it just seemed as if his face was perfect. Innocent and strong. And - why not? - exotic, too, bu exotic in the sense of being distinct from most of the other faces we saw every day. A face I would design if I could design a face for the son I was never going to have. It was an Asian face. Not unlike the one I used to see in the mirror so many decades ago, the one I was so ashamed of for its distinctive contours. The one I spent years trying to alter with clothespins and duct tape. ~ Alex Tizon

In spite of all these disquieting triumphs in the field of natural science, it's astonishing how little man has learned about himself, and how much there is to learn. How little we know about this brain which made social evolution possible, and of the mind. How little we know of the nature and spirit of man and God. We stand now before this inner frontier of ignorance. If we could pass it, we might well discover the meaning of life and understand man's destiny. ~ Wilder Penfield

If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals. ~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall

He was a small, chubby little man with a perpetual air of sadness about him, making him look like a baby that has dropped its rattle. ~ Marion Chesney

He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the horse functioned as a sort of manufacturer's warning that the shirt was highly likely to be transporting a muppet. ~ Fredrik Backman

When a jockey retires, he just becomes another little man ~ Eddie Arcaro

Have a seat." The deep voice, shrouded in authority, commanded. It came from the little man sitting one chair down from the woman.

I had the urge to say, "Make me," but instead I shrugged and remained standing.

"Insolent girl. Do you not respect our authority?"

"You have done nothing to earn my respect. ~ Liz Schulte

Sarah put the man and the other dead children out of her head. Later, perhaps, she would watch Lockie out in the garden and cry for all the mothers who would not see their children again. Later she would weep for the sadness of their loss and the joy of her own luck, but now she only had eyes for her boy, her little man, her Lockie. She ran her hands over his body, lifted his shirt a little and caught sight of a yellowing bruise. The air caught in her throat.
'Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,' she whispered.
Someone had hit him. She wanted to undress him right then to see the damage but Lockie was so fast asleep. She knew he wasn't just sleeping because he was tired. He had gone to the same place she had been in for months. She and Lockie looked alike now. The angles on his face matched hers and in a way she was glad.
She had suffered along with him.
And now here he was. ~ Nicole Trope

Thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy. ~ Jack Kerouac

Dead bodies plus a hit of absinthe are really the best cure for that insane little man. ~ Michelle Gable

Tabitha blinked innocently. "Why is your consort speaking to me without my having addressed him first?" she asked Kaia. "Have you not taught him the proper order of things?"
So the little man wasn't supposed to speak to the women folk without an invitation? Screw that. "Just stay out of my head, Harpy, or I'll make sure you regret it. By the way, how's the leg?"
She hissed at him.
Win! ~ Gena Showalter

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. ~ Wilhelm Reich

And, er, these stories about you..."

"Oh, all true. Most of them. A bit of exaggeration, but mostly true."

"The one about the Citadel in Muntab and the Pash and the fish bone?"

"Oh, yes."

"But how did you get in where half a dozen armed and trained men couldn't even - ?"

"I am a little man and I carry a broom," said Lu-Tze simply. "Everyone has some mess that needs clearing up. What harm is a man with a broom?"

"What? And that was it?"

"Well, the rest was a matter of cookery, really. The Pash was not a good man, but he was a glutton for his fish pie."

"No martial arts?" said Lobsang.

"Oh, always a last resort. History needs shepherds, not butchers."

"Do you know okidoki?"

"Just a lot of bunny-hops."

"Shittake?"

"If I wanted to thrust my hand into hot sand I would go to the seaside."

"Upsidazi?"

"A waste of good bricks."

"No kando?"

"You made that one up. ~ Terry Pratchett

If I give you two possible worlds to choose from, in which you would like your children and grandchildren to live, which one would you choose - a world filled with hatred and discrimination, or a world where the humans care about their fellow humans beyond the petty little man-made labels of religion, race, nationality, intellect, gender etc.!

We do not need to make efforts and be kind in order to keep Nature running, she can do that quite well and far better than us herself, in fact, it'd benefit Nature, if suddenly the humans were to disappear. It is us who need Nature in order to exist, not the other way around.

We must stand on the side of kindness, goodness, compassion and conscience, not to keep the processes in Nature functioning, but because if we don't, the environment that we would be giving our future generations, would be no different than the violent and lethal environment of the wild. Hence, our kindness would make no difference to Nature whatsoever, rather it would simply be a selfish yet humanely necessary act on our part, that we must carry out to create a humane environment for the human species.

Upon the kindness of us humans, the fate of humanity is predicated, not the fate of Nature. We are born in a world filled with hatred and discrimination, hence it is our existential responsibility as sentient and conscientious beings to contribute in the elimination of such discrimination and hatred. Kindness of ours in our daily wal ~ Abhijit Naskar

Sartre gazed upon Freya's beauty, continuously reminding himself that he should not stare. Every time that he let his guard down, his eye wandered back to her cherry lips. He wanted to know if they tasted as good as they looked. He trailed down and noticed how the slight cleft in her chin served to accentuate the much deeper cleft between her breasts.

Freya detected Sartre skimming her body. She liked it. This frail little man with the crazy eye was so much different than the strong, muscular brutes that she was used to. He was a cute little oddity. ~ Dylan Callens

A little man often cast a long shadow. ~ G. M. Trevelyan

Crawling around on the table was a tiny man gathering crumbs. He was about six inches tall, if he were to stand up. He had greenish skin with brown hair and appeared similar to a doll-sized human wearing little scraps of clothing. Sensing he had an audience, the little man also froze. His already large eyes opened even farther as we held each other's stare and time seemed to stand still. The moment ended in an instant when the man vanished, like a bubble that burst, he was just gone. ~ Jill Ramsower

As far as I'm concerned, I want to remain the mean little man I always was. ~ Jack Levine

I've been on a quest for spiritual answers for a long time. The things I've learned about interconnectedness and non-duality and the feeling of tapping into your soul that goes beyond the edge of your skin is important to me. Once I learned that, I'm far less often trapped in my own little man problems. Me against the universe problems. ~ Jim Carrey

The lawyer was a short, ugly, little man. He stood about three feet taller than his desk's two foot eight inch frame and he had dark eyes. Lois couldn't tell if they were black or an extremely dark brown. His hair was dirty blonde and very messy. He looked as if he had just crawled out of bed. His white button up shirt was tucked in on only one side and the other side hung out freely. He wore a pair of tan khakis and a pair of black loafers. His skin almost matched the khakis which was extremely creepy and Lois kept thinking the man wasn't wearing pants. ~ Rebecca McNutt

I am the sea witch. I am the tide you fear and the turning you can't deny. I am the sound of the waves running over your bones on the beach, little man, and I am not amused at finding you on my doorstep. ~ Seanan McGuire

If a great man struggling with misfortunes is a noble object, a little man that despises them is no contemptible one. ~ William Cowper

What are you looking for, little man? Is it yourself you're trying to identify?Are you looking at little things to avoid big things? ~ John Steinbeck

I thought you were going to be a grey little man like most of us but you outshone us all. When your times comes, Guntram, you could look Death in the face and tell her, 'I go now but how I lived my life! ~ Tionne Rogers

I'll know I'm famous when I have five Ferraris, seven houses, Cameron Diaz on my arm and a little man following me with a huge bag of money. ~ Brian McFadden

He turned to look at me straight on, and I saw a kind of purplish fire in his eyes, a hint that this whiny, plump little man was only showing me the tiniest bit of his true nature. I saw visions of grape vines choking unbelievers to death, drunken warriors insane with battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers, their faces elongating into dolphin snouts. I knew that if I pushed him, Mr D would show me worse things. He would plant a disease in my brain that would leave me wearing a straitjacket in a rubber room for the rest of my life. 'Would you like to test me, child?' he said quietly. 'No. No, sir. ~ Rick Riordan

Have you ever tried to get an elderly relative to play a video game? Highlander is a way to experience the confusion and bewilderment they feel, even if you're well versed with the medium yourself. What's going on? Why isn't the little man moving? Why does he keep falling over? Why can't I ever win? Can I stop playing and watch Columbo now? ~ Stuart Ashen

In December 2008 [Manny Pacquiao] defied the odds and pummeled the celebrated American boxer Oscar De Le Hoya into submission and permanent retirement.
An on-air exchange by the stunned HBO announcing team:
"Pacquiao is the most exciting little fighter in the world."
"Little?! He looks big tonight!"
"/Big/ little fighter in the world. ~ Alex Tizon

Tommy, you're a good little man, but you can't gamble worth a cent. Don't try it over again.' He then handed him his money back, pushed him gently from the room, and so made a devoted slave of Tom Simson. ~ Bret Harte

You are giving a little man a biscuit to eat, and you put a barrel of flour more taxes on top of his head to carry. ~ Huey Long

How can any man tell all that he knows, Great Lord," the little man said smoothly. "It would be only prattle, until it becomes useful. ~ Robert Jordan

And for five long hours the little man sat motionless, blinking his eyelids like a cat, his green eyes flickering and becoming steadily greener and greener. ~ Agatha Christie

My dear Princess, if you could creep unseen about your City, peeping at will through the curtain-shielded windows, you would come to think that all the world was little else than a big nursery full of crying children with none to comfort them. The doll is broken: no longer it sweetly sqeaks in answer to our pressure, "I love you, kiss me." The drum lies silent with the drumstick inside, no longer do we make a brave noise in the nursery. The box of tea-things we have clumsily put out foot upon; there will be no more merry parties around the three-legged stool. The tin trumpet will not play the note we want to sound; the wooden bricks keep falling down; the toy has exploded and burnt our fingers. Never mind, little man, little woman, we will try and mend things to-morrow ~ Jerome K. Jerome

One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man ~ Virginia Woolf

those unfortunate enough to be killed by Smee generally die thinking, What a dear little man. ~ Heidi Schulz

God was singing through this little man to all the world. ~ Peter Shaffer

The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man. ~ Gregory Maguire

There was a moment, however, when the King and I were looking directly into each other's eyes, and in that instant I had a revelation that takes much longer to explain than to experience. Here am I, I reflected, being decorated as a hero, and in the eyes of everybody here I am indeed a hero; but I know that my heroic act was rather a dirty job I did when I was dreadfully frightened; I could just as easily have muddled it and been ingloriously killed. But it doesn't much matter, because people seem to need heroes; so long as I don't lose sight of the truth, it might as well be me as anyone else. And here before me stands a marvellously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great, and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I know to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. ~ Robertson Davies

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,
not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only! ~ Henry David Thoreau

Someone on the internet referred to me as 'that horrible little man who's replacing Rob Lowe', which is hurtful, because I think of myself as a delightful little man. ~ Joshua Malina

The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars. ~ Robert James Waller

You said to imagine a great big sphere, and inside is all of time and space. All of it. And outside are these intelligent entities, and all they are is curious; all they want to do is experience."
"Go on," Alice said. Her eyes are so bright.…
"One might say: 'I want the experience of being a seventeen-year-old girl in the fourteenth century who was burned at the stake.' Or 'I'd like the experience of being a four-month aborted fetus in 1994.' And they just dive in and do it." I looked at Alice. She was waiting for something. I thought about what I just said, and then I remembered: "They have to create what happens. Write a script." She still waited, so I said, "Not only the experience itself; the house, the city, the country, the whole world where it happens. All of it."
"Which makes that entity responsible for all of it," she reminded me.
"So that's who the 'little man watching' really is - that, that thing - "
"Not a thing," she said, interrupting for the very first time. "It's you. You're living a script that you wrote. Which is why free will and predestination are the same thing. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper-no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of the point. ~ Winston Churchill

In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. ~ Milton Sanford Mayer

I tried on various uniforms of manhood in my teens and twenties. [...] I slipped in and out of these uniforms like someone in a fitting room at Macy's trying on suits, except I'd walk around in them for a few months or years. The only suits I avoided were Asian ones. I had already concluded that being Asian did not play in one's favour as a man, not in this land of giants. ~ Alex Tizon

Never let a little man to sit on a big chair; that would be a big disaster! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame. ~ John Steinbeck

What's this business about the 'little man in the canoe?' If it's big enough for a canoe, it's too big for me. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

Possessing a language meant possessing the world expressed in its words. Dispossessing it meant nothing less than the loss of a world and the beginning of bewilderment forever. "Language is the only homeland," said poet Czeslaw Milosz. My parents left the world that created them and now would be beginners for the rest of their lives, mumblers searching for the right word, the proper phrase that approximated what they felt inside. I wonder at the eloquence that must have lived inside them that never found a way out. ~ Alex Tizon

Adam found his father out. It wasn't that his father changed but that some new quality came to Adam. He had always hated the discipline, as every normal animal does, but it was just and true and inevitable as measles, not to be denied or cursed, only to be hated. And then–it was very fast, almost a click in the brain–Adam knew that, for him at least, his father's methods had no reference to anything in the world except his father. The techniques and training were not designed for the boys at all but only to make Cyrus a great man. And the same click in the brain told Adam that his father was not a great man, that he was, indeed, a very strong-willed and concentrated little man wearing a huge busby. Who knows what causes this–a look in the eye, a lie found out, a moment of hesitation?–then god comes crashing down in a child's brain. ~ John Steinbeck

This notary was a little man, completely round, round in every part. His head looked like a ball nailed onto another ball, supported by two legs that were so tiny and so short that they also closely resembled balls. ~ Guy De Maupassant

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

Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Make no mistake: it's not that I actively dislike you. That would take an effort on my part that I have absolutely no interest in exerting on behalf of such an insignificant little man such as yourself. No, I am indifferent towards you with absolutely no hope for an upgrade. ~ Jordan Krumbine

I've never seen a man who understands so little about women and yet is so led about by them. ~ Mark Lawrence

He lied," she said. "There is no way for us to seize bitcoins. Well, there is no current way for the federal government to seize bitcoins at will; in order to do that we'd need one of the creators of the currency." She paused and watched me very closely for a reaction.

This was all still gibberish to me. This was something out of a science fiction novel, or a Stephen King movie with Tom Cruise where Tom Cruise has to run someplace from some people - because that's what Tom Cruise does, he runs while looking concerned and futuristic.

Therefore, I decided to look surprised and thoughtful.

"Yes." She nodded; she believed I was following her train of thought. I wasn't following her train because mine had derailed on thoughts of a running Tom Cruise…weird little man. ~ Penny Reid

They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa. ~ Janette Turner Hospital

Far from being this big, booming voice, the Daily Mail is just a little man behind a curtain. ~ Steve Coogan

And here before me stands a marvelously groomed little man who is pinning a hero's medal on me because some of his forebears were Alfred the Great and Charles the First, and even King Arthur, for anything I knew to the contrary. But I shouldn't be surprised if inside he feels as puzzled about the fate that brings him here as I. we are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet very necessary; we have obligations above what is merely personal, and to let personal feelings obscure the obligations would be failing in one's duty.

This was clearer still afterward, at lunch at the Savoy....; they all seemed to accept me as a genuine hero, and I did my best to behave decently, neither believing in it too obviously, nor yet protesting that I was just a simple chap who had done his duty when he saw it--a pose that has always disgusted me. Ever since, I have tried to think charitably of people in prominent positions of one kind or another. We cast them in roles, and it is only right to consider them as players, without trying to discredit them with knowledge of their off-stage life--unless they drag it into the middle of the stage themselves. ~ Robertson Davies

And I laugh and I spin and dance and frolic in ecstasy and I ... I hurt no more, while you ... you petrified little man, are left to wonder if it's you I speak of. ~ Kellie Elmore