Quotes About Standards

W]e must add at once that a judgement on Mozart's verbal coprophilia would necessarily miss the mark if it applied present-day standards of civilization, thus implicitly regarding our own canon of sensibility as universal, a canon for the whole mankind, and not as one that has developed. To do justice to Mozart's tendency, we need to have a clear idea of the civilizing process in the course of which the social canon of behavior and feeling changes in a specific way.

If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?

If you want to avoid criticism, it's better to be good than it is to be great.

In Hell, you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.

dying seems like the greatest weakness, and in a world where people say you're lazy for not shaving your legs, then being dead seems like the ultimate character flaw. Chapter I.

When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you're less than the sum of your parts.

Evie says that beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don't generate enough attention. Evie says there's a whole shift in the beauty standard when they're together. You can feel this, Evie says. When both of you are beautiful, neither of you is beautiful. Together, as a couple, you're less than the sum of your parts.

Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who used to be called insane are the picture of perfect mental health.

In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.

You know how you look at ugly hunchback girls, and they are so lucky. Nobody drags them out at night so they can't finish their doctorate thesis papers. They don't get yelled at by fashion photographers if they get infected ingrown bikini hairs. You look at burn victims and think how much time they save not looking in mirrors to check their skin for sun damage.

beautiful people should never date each other. Together, they just don't generate enough attention. Evie says there's a whole shift in the beauty standard when they're together.

I'm disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful; I'm much more fascinated with the other side.

Ethics are more important than laws. —Wynton Marsalis, artistic director, Jazz at Lincoln Center

Yet sometimes the world judges females by a different standard and seeks to punish them unjustly.

I've cared for heaps of people, but not to marry them' she said. 'I suppose I'm too fastidious. all my life I've wanted somebody I could look up to, somebody great and big and splendid. Most men are so small.' 'What d;you mean by splendid?' Hewet asked. 'People are-nothing more.

We have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal in the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.

There is no mark on the wall to measure the precise height of women. There are no yard measures neatly divided into the fractions of an inch that one can lay against the qualities of a good mother or the devotion of a daughter or fidelity of a sister or the capacity of a housekeeper.

Is it the lot of average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?

Uncomfortable without a standard for right and wrong, the judgmental mind makes up standards of its own. Meanwhile, attention is taken off what is and placed on the process of trying to do things right.

We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

Evangelicals sometimes expect too much or, to put it more precisely, we look for a kind of change God hasn't promised. It's possible to expect too little, but under-expectation is usually a cynical reaction to dashed hopes for too much. We manage to interpret biblical teaching to support our longing for perfection. As a result, we measure our progress by standards we will never meet until heaven.

It's about knowing yourself, knowing your values, and becoming uncompromising in your willingness to do whatever it takes to stand up for them.

What you tolerate is what you endorse.