Quotes About Standards

He had that extra four or five inches of neck which disqualifies a man for high honors in the beauty competition

Academic training in beauty is a sham. When we love a woman, we don't start measuring her legs.

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are.

It's useless to obsess over one standard of beauty, since it can change as soon as you cross a border. My travels have taught me this: The world can't decide what's beautiful. So you decide, okay?

Consider a daily newspaper or television newscast and eliminate from it every report that presupposes a breaking of one of the Ten Commandments. Very little will be left.

Churchill. Langdon needed a moment to realize she was referring to none other than Winston Churchill himself, the celebrated British statesman who, in addition to being a military hero, historian, orator, and Nobel Prize–winning author, was an artist of remarkable talent. Langdon now recalled Edmond quoting the British prime minister once in response to a comment someone made about religious people hating him: You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something!

Guest Relations Handbook

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something!

The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form.?

Look, it's to the point where kids are getting Botox. It's insane. We're not allowed to age

I can't get my knickers in a twist about my age and ageing in an industry that caters to the ids of 14-year-olds.

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

Pathetic Earthlings... There's not enough makeup in the universe to cover those hideous, age-ravaged potato sacks that you call faces.

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

We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a decent and a democratic nation, as we still apparently wish to think ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence and are reduced merely to talk.

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

If the people in our state and national governments undertook to evaluate economic enterprises by the standards of long-term economics, they would have to employ their minds in actual thinking. For many of them, this would be a shattering experience, something altogether new, but it would also cause them to learn things and do things that would improve the lives of their constituents.

to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.

ethnocentrism—the tendency to evaluate the customs of other groups according to one's own cultural standards.

Better than Grace Kelly but no Sophia Loren.

There was once a common understanding in our society among men that there are standards of action and behavior to which men should hold themselves. Men, the code dictates, among other things, keep their word, whether in writing or not, men do not take advantage of women, men support their children, and men watch their language, especially around women and children. The code of men is fading.

Asking schools to even consider addressing social and political issues that divide the American people inevitably leads to conflict, as citizens conclude either that the schools have usurped the authority of parents and churches or that they have failed to keep up with the times. In one breath the public demands higher academic standards and the basics, in another attention to just about every divisive social problem.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.

Of course we measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice until itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth.