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Updated: September 22, 2025
"What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet." The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison.
Brooks seemed to me the bodily presentment of a set of values which I would have kept constantly before my eyes.... I felt him drawing me, overcoming my hesitation, belittling my fear of ridicule. I began gently to open the door when something happened, one of those little things that may change the course of a life.
It was abundantly manifest that the object was by wounding the feelings of and belittling the Filipino Government to provoke a collision, and it was clear also that this system of exasperating us was not merely the wanton act of the soldiery but was actually prompted by General Otis himself, who, imbued with imperialistic tendencies, regarded the coming of the Civil Commission with disfavour and especially would it be unsatisfactory that this Commission should find the Philippines in a state of perfect tranquility, because it was evident to the said General, as well as to the whole world, that the Filipinos would assuredly have arrived at a definite amicable agreement with the aforesaid Commission if it reached the islands while peace prevailed.
"It is the spirit of the quest which helps. I am the slave of this spirit of the quest." Roy's recherché little dinner proved an unqualified success. With sole and chicken sauté, with trifle and savoury, he mutely pleaded his cause; feeling vaguely guilty, the while, of belittling his childhood's idol, whom he increasingly admired and loved.
But, worse than that, this folly is an intellectual depletion. This endless study of proprieties and etiquette, patterns and styles, is bedwarfing to the intellect. I never knew a man or a woman of extreme fashion that knew much. How belittling the study of the cut of a coat, or the tie of a cravat, or the wrinkle in a shoe, or the color of a ribbon!
After thus finally belittling the two poets, he shot a parting shaft at German idealism in his farewell to the academicians. He bade them beware of idealogues as dangerous dreamers and disguised materialists.
She smiled to herself at the terrible truth of the words which so much amused the cardinal; but she continued to talk in the same strain, giving him the infinity of small reasons, under which a clever woman will hide her chief one, confusing a man's impression of the whole by her superior handling of its parts, exaggerating the one detail and belittling the next, until all proportion and true perspective are lost, and the man leaves her with the sensation of having been delicately taken to pieces, and put together again with his face turned backwards, over his shoulders.
Remember you are talking to a man who is a member of a traditionally reticent and unexpansive race; who says about one third of what he feels; who is obsessed by a mania for understating his country's case, exaggerating its weaknesses, and belittling its efforts; who is secretly shy, so covers up his shyness with a cloak of aggressiveness which is offensive to those who are not prepared for it.
Standing here, facing the interval between the Main Building and Machinery Hall, our eyes and steps are conducted from great to greater by a group of buildings which must bear their true name of offices, belittling as a title suggestive of clerks and counting-rooms is to dimensions and capacity exceeding those of most churches.
The rhetorical trick of belittling the matter by speaking of it as "fisticuffs" will not pass in this discussion. When the South Carolina negroes on election day looked into the rifle-barrels of the Red-shirt clubs, it was no matter of fisticuffs. When every statesman in our country was eagerly seeking a peaceful solution of the Hayes-Tilden dispute, it was not fisticuffs that they feared.
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