Quotes About Standards

Quality attracts quality. People want to be on a good show.

We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

On the superficiality of the industry: We are setting an example of what we think is beautiful and you really want to put that much make up on me?

You could be as vulgar as you want, as long as three tiny spots were covered.

I can make a record like the [previous] one I put out, but I don't want to do that because I want to set the bar so high for myself. I don't want to do it like everyone else.

Humans insisted on others behaving properly, but rarely forced the same standards upon themselves. Justifications dispensed with logic, thriving on opportunism and delusions of pious propriety.

From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa's new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe.

And if the novel [ The Education of Cyrus ] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.

As we care about more of humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.

I want to show how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.

They don't make it as well as they did in the past!0

His kin are proud of themselves and because none of them are truly ugly, Wraethru are never ashamed to admit they are beautiful. Only in a world where ugliness prevails is it a shame to be vain, a cruelty to appreciate loveliness in oneself.

How could the same nose, mouth and eyes appear handsome in one man, merely plain in another?

We tolerate so much more than is healthy from those who are beautiful.

Why did these big wheels kill themselves? They weren't able to live up to the standards they were accustomed to, and they got ashamed in front of their women. You see, you can tell anybody a lie, and he'll agree with you. But you start layin' down the facts of real life, he won't accept it. The American white man has been superior so long, he can't figure out why he should come down.

The tyranny of Venus is felt whenever a woman thinks—or whenever a man thinks and tells a woman—that her hips are too wide, her thighs are too large, her breasts are too small, her waist is too high, her legs are too short to meet the current erotic standard.

According to the classical Greeks, in the perfect female torso the distance between the nipples of the breasts, the distance from the lower edge of the breast to the navel, and the distance from the navel to the crotch were units of equal length.

Accomplishment is socially judged by ill defined criteria so that one has to rely on others to find out how one is doing.

There's no socially acceptable middle age.

Societal pressures can really force girls to look one specific way, when in reality there's not one way to be good.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

Raoul' sold a respectable 700,000 copies without a hit single. It didn't take off. If you don't sell 8 million albums or 4 million albums again, everybody deems it a big failure.

To have a No. 1 with 130,000 copies sold is, you know, I remember when we first started selling records, in order to have a No. 1, you'd have to sell at least a half a million if not more, for the rock side of things.

I like a bit of eye candy like anyone but to have it solely about the eye candy and have it fall into a category so rigidly as well is wrong.