Quotes About Small-mindedness

Small country, small men.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

Britain can sometimes feel like a very small village, and you're this, I dunno, scarlet woman they're all gossiping about.

and though I was obliged to see her magnificent hat, at least I managed to banish from her face the signs of a joy that I ought to have been happy to share with her, but which, as so often happens while those whom we love best are still alive, can strike us as a mere irritant, a mark of something silly and small-minded, rather than the precious revelation of the happiness we long to give to them.

In his essay "Equality" (1943), Lewis advises: "Watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers." In other words, those who debunk tend not to be straightforwardly critical, but usually have "an agenda" (as we now say); the opposition that debunkers have to things is not honest and reasonable but tainted by an inferiority complex, or small-mindedness, or some other intellectual defect.