Famous quotes containing the words pygmy, blue and/or whales:
“Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I think I noticed once
T’was morning one sole street-lamp still bright-lit,
Which, with a senile grin, like an old dunce,
Vied the blue sky, and tried to rival it....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they’d be smaller then these.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)