Quotes About Mediocrity

One of the many curious aspects of American culture is the absence of an "upper" class, a "high" society, an hedonic aristocracy. America since Lincoln has been a heavy, feet-on-the-ground John Wayne society. The triumph of mediocrity and practicality.

There has been an obvious effort to play it safe, to make 'Bonanza' a good family show that would offend no one and hit a consistent level of mediocrity.

The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.

Chaque fois qu'on produit un effet, on se donne un ennemi. Il faut rester médiocre pour être populaire.

Like all good reputations... every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

To be popular, one must be a mediocrity.

Cada impresión producida crea un enemigo. Para ser popular hay que ser una mediocridad

I also saw that Piedmont and Bennington were not evil men. They were just predictably mediocre. Their dreams and aspirations had the grandeur, scope, and breadth of postage stamps.

It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fencesitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die.

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote."   TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO

In an age of militant mediocrity, an 'extremist' is anyone who takes a position.

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

Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If

The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of "trained skill."138 Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers.

Dependence leads to fear; fear leads to comparisons; comparisons lead to competition, and competition eventually destroys us by degrading us to imitation, conformity, infantilism or mediocrity.

And worse, they'll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence.

I have been like a mediocre concert pianist playing in front of a tone-deaf family, who applaud out of duty rather than for accomplishment.

You don't get angry at the successful geniuses, you get angry at the successful mediocrities, and at the people who can't tell the fucking difference.

the regime's utter cultural and intellectual mediocrity, and especially its obsession with ensuring a rigid outward conformity to its neo-traditionalist values in public life.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra--the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities.

Zappa warned you of the threat of mediocrity in music.

For hate dies, suffocated to death by its own stupidity and mediocrity. But grandeur is eternal.

It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.