With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
--
The Raven and Other Poems (1845), PrefaceEdgar Allan Poe
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Hope is paltry food for living.
John McAfee
The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.
Philip Kindred - a.k.a. PKD Dick
Men who long for freedom begin the attempt to obtain it by entreating their masters to be kind enough to protect them by modifying the laws which these masters themselves have created!
But times and tempers are changed. Rebels are everywhere to be found who no longer wish to obey the law without knowing whence it comes, what are its uses, and whither arises the obligation to submit to it, and the reverence with which it is encompassed. The rebels of our day are criticizing the very foundations of society which have hitherto been held sacred, and first and foremost amongst them that fetish, law.
The critics analyze the sources of law, and find there either a god, product of the terrors of the savage, and stupid, paltry, and malicious as the priests who vouch for its supernatural origin, or else, bloodshed, conquest by fire and sword. They study the characteristics of law, and instead of perpetual growth corresponding to that of the human race, they find its distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day.Peter Kropotkin
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.
David Gilmour
Poe, Edgar Allan
Poehler, Amy
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