Top 101 Lesser Quotes

If I ever feel like I’m messing up, making the worst decisions, or I’m just lesser than – if I’m being self-deprecating – I just think, ‘Cheer up, dude, you’re a lot worse than you think.’ It makes me laugh. It takes me out of it.

It’s pretty sad when you have to choose between the lesser of two evils.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

‘You, too, can be the President,’ every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

I say I’m the only serious comedian in the presidential race. And I’d like to take this opportunity to ask both Romney and Obama to debate me. Because I think that both of those guys – I think that the American people are being given a false choice, because the choice between the lesser of two evils is a false choice.

I think that the more we, as a state, yield and cede decisions to the federal government, the lesser we’ll be for it as a state.

Ultimately, criticism that ‘The Real World’ has devolved into a lesser enterprise comes from the viewers who came of age alongside it, not the teens of the moment that MTV has always existed for.

Rakshabandhan is one day in a year I always look forward to… As children, we used to get presents and money, and there would be a full line-up of rakhi brothers, but as I grew older, the excitement was lesser as the love grew deeper.

The Hegelian dynamic plays out daily on and off the film sets – women are not lesser beings, but because they are assumed to be, they are subjected to inferior conditions. And this inferiority projects itself through the feeling of weakness and subjugation.

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.

The lesser jihad is our active fulfillment of Islam’s commands and duties.

The worst mistake anyone can make is to perceive anyone else as lesser. The deeper you look into other souls – and writing is primarily an exercise in doing just that – the clearer people’s inherent dignity becomes.

We have spent billions to go to the moon – we go to this lesser satellite called the moon and say we are in space, but we are in space right now; we just don’t feel ourselves to be in space. Some forms of art and some forms of spirituality do give us that sense.

We may not commit a lesser Sin under pretence to avoid a greater, but we may, nay we ought to endure the greatest Pain and Grief rather than commit the least Sin.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

I don’t really get the same kinda romance that I would get from, like, jazz. And even to a lesser extent to rock ‘n roll. Rock ‘n roll has a romance to it – how can I put it? A very vulgar romance, but still a romance; whereas hip hop has more facade.

I’ve always been second fiddle, man, to everything. Everything. But I never believed that I was lesser than this person, that person, anybody. I always thought I was on the same level.

The big problem for atomic energy is that it can’t compete on price with the new age of cheap shale gas and, to a lesser extent, clean coal.

All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins.

Sure, sometimes guys pass you up in salary, and maybe it’s a lesser player, but it’s all based on what a team has as far as value in that person.

I hate when people talk about weekly wrestling shows that are lesser than pay-per-views. The fact is pay-per-views are longer, but the wrestling will be just as intense and exciting.

Let us search into the records of Holy Writ, if out of this their great charter, there be not a seal grant of a lesser, though like privilege, and this by virtue of Christ, in that we have the honour to be accounted Abraham’s seed as truly as they.

Obama considers himself above deal-making and back-slapping, political necessities he often delegates to Vice President Joe Biden and other lesser sorts.

I’m tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things I enjoy somehow make me a lesser person.

Why on Earth would the United States ever want to be more like Europe? Correct me if I’m wrong, but we left, did we not? Not only did we leave that older, lesser world behind, but we left skid-marks along the way with an entire continent eating our proverbial dust.

The difference of great players is at a certain point in a match they raise their level of play and maintain it. Lesser players play great for a set, but then less.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

Casting directors don’t necessarily want a more recognizable commercial face. Sometimes, they want a lesser known person.

In Greece, Italy and, to a lesser extent, France, unsustainable tax cuts and spending sprees added to households’ estimates of their private wealth relative to their wage income.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

That a society controls, to a greater or lesser extent, the behavior of its members is a universal; but the methods, the particulars of that control, vary from one culture to another.

None of the established museums were treating cartoons seriously. It was considered a lesser art or no art at all, just a way to sell newspapers. Even the syndicates who were dedicated to the cartoons were throwing them out, figuring they had no value after they were printed.

The last dog I had was an Irish wolfhound – now that is a dog. Rather spoils a person for a lesser canine, that is, anything under a hundredweight.

Over the past several years, all of us as Canadians, and as members of the North American cultural and economic environment, have been to a greater or lesser extent party to a significant attitudinal change towards our culture.

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.

My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that’s true of me, too.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

With the Kick It Out campaign, I was interested in asking: ‘Why is antisemitism a lesser racism than other racisms?’ I genuinely believe that to be the case – that negative stuff said against Jews isn’t considered that important.

Most sketch aficionados have an enormous amount of respect for ‘Mr. Show.’ I didn’t have HBO back then, so I was always trying to find episodes. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross became celebrities, and Jay Johnston – who’s lesser known, but brilliant – deserves a lot of credit, too.

Successful people recognize crisis as a time for change – from lesser to greater, smaller to bigger.

I was never treated differently. I never felt like I was lesser or I was discriminated against. I’ve only experienced that after I became an actor.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

You shouldn’t have to accept being seen as lesser or discriminated against because of your skin.

I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.

As in the Divine Right of Kings, hierarchies invest those who preside at the top of their pyramidal structure with absolute power to rule over the lesser ranks that spread down like a marble staircase to the broad foundation stones of those with no power at all.

I recognize myself to a lesser or greater extent in everything I read, good and bad, and that’s part of being a human being if you’re honest enough. And obviously the darker parts are the things you don’t let control you.

There are a lot of challenges I undeniably have faced as a black person both in the U.K. and in the U.S. that contrived to make me feel lesser than what I am.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman’s domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.

We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.

A lesser but still fundamental rule of racing is that you properly enter the event. Anyone who doesn’t but still insists on running interferes with the paying customers.

I don’t think of myself as a lesser player.

Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality.

The older painting – well, it does have an effect all at once, I suppose, but it’s of a lesser intensity than a lot of the American work in the last ten or fifteen years.