I’ve been collecting famous quotes about being short. Wisdom, descriptions of characters, anything that provides some insight into how the world perceives us little guys. Some are pretty ugly. Others inspirational. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

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“Give me a guy less than five feet eight, Johnson, and I’ll give you a real bastard nine times out of ten. It has been my experience that short men get a chip on their shoulders as big as an aircraft carrier. They’re pissed off at life and God and everybody else just because they’re midgets. I’m a blunt man, Johnson, and I’ll tell you that I always keep my eye out for a little guy because I know he’s down there low with his hands around my nuts waiting for a chance to give me the big squeeze.”

Colonel Bull Meecham, Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini.

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“A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him.”

Mae West

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“If I had a choice, if I could go to a store and they’d say, ‘Well  when you grow up what do you want to be?’ I’d know exactly what I’d want to be. I’d pick five foot ten. I think the beautiful people are about that height for a man.”

5’4” world champion race car driver Mario Andretti as quoted in The Height of Your Life.

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“There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height. ”

Victor Hugo 

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“I certainly did feel inferior. Because of class. Because of strength. Because of height. I guess if I’d been able to hit somebody in the nose, I wouldn’t have been a comic.”

Dudley Moore 

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“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” 

Mark Twain

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“Bond had always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be bigger than others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that created all the trouble in the world. ”

Ian Fleming, Goldfinger.

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‘Tall men come down to my height when I hit ’em in the body.”

Jack Dempsey

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“If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.”

Michael J. Fox

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“I failed to make the chess team because of my height.”

Woody Allen 

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“I was told I would never make it because I’m too short. Well, I’m still too short. It doesn’t matter what your height is, it’s what’s in your heart.”

Kirby Puckett 

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“Short is funnier than tall; pray for an audience of midgets.”

Milton Berle, Milton Berle’s Personal Joke File

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“Bodean Gazzer was five feet six and  had never forgiven his parents for it. He wore three inch snakeskin shitkickers and walked with a swagger that suggested not brawn so much as hemorrhoidal tribulation.”

Carl Hiaasen’s Lucky You

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“A man is at a disadvantage talking to a woman as tall as he is, and I had tried long and hard to overcome this handicap.”

Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It

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“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

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“I have a young heart. I have a lot of spunk left in me. And I think short people seem younger.”

Dolly Parton

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This is an ongoing collection, and old Monty could use your help. If you come across other quotations about short men, please feel free to post them in the comments section below. I’ll add them to this list.