Trivial Quotes

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. (Bertrand Russell)
Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority. View quote
Mary Wollstonecraft
While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact. View quote
Andrea Dworkin
In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all. View quote
Isaac Asimov
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up. View quote
Max Beerbohm
God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again. View quote
Federico Fellini
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. View quote
Karl Marx
A warrior takes responsibility for his acts, for the most trivial of his acts. An average man acts out his thoughts, and never takes responsibility for what he does. View quote
Carlos Castaneda
What dire offence from amorous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I sing. View quote
Alexander Pope
Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious. (Samuel Johnson)
Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. View quote
John Fowles
The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved. View quote
George Washington
Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. View quote
George Steiner
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. View quote
Erich Fromm
No sociologist, for instance, should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time. View quote
Max Weber
In the scope of a happy life, a messy desk or an overstuffed coat closet is a trivial thing, yet I find - and I hear from other people that they agree - that getting rid of clutter gives a disproportionate boost to happiness. View quote
Gretchen Rubin
My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims. View quote
Kevin Mitnick
There is no one force, no group, and no class that is the preserver of liberty. Liberty is preserved by those who are against the existing chief power. Oppositions which do not express genuine social forces are as trivial, in relation to entrenched power, as the old court jesters. View quote
James Burnham
She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,--when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent. (George Eliot)
Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit. View quote
George Eliot
Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don't you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct. View quote
Robert Frost
I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward – I ask for no reward – only to live & to hear my work. View quote
Edward Elgar
There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith