Quotes About Exceptionalism

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, said a wise man. If so, what happens to excellence when we eliminate the difficulty and the rarity?

That Dr. Hauptmann might have ties so far up—that the telephone on his desk connects him with men a hundred miles away who could probably wag a finger and send a dozen Messerschmitts streaming up from an airfield to strafe some city—intoxicates Werner. We live in exceptional times.

I'll never be a Mentat," he said. "I'm something else…a freak.

Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity....The young must be damped down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment.

You can be famous for a lot of things. You can be a Nobel-prize winner. You can be the fattest guy in the world.

The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.

The problem with some of our noisier exponents of 'American exceptionalism' is that they lack Reagan's moral maturity.

The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

Genuinely normal people were the first to die. Surivors were the few individuals endowed with exceptional tough-mindedness and a certain insensitivity.

We are all special cases.

Please. She sighed. 'Can't a girl have high standards? I don't want an ordinary boy.

Can't a girl have high standards? I don't want an ordinary boy.

To us — richer and cleverer than everyone else!

Using every means possible to show that, although you're just an ordinary human being, you're far above other mortals.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

In studying the character and works of a great man, it is always desirable to learn in what he is distinguished from others, and what have been the causes if this difference.

Every select man strives instinctively for a citadel and a privacy, where he is FREE from the crowd, the many, the majority-- where he may forget men who are the rule, as their exception;-- exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as a discerner in the great and exceptional sense.

The monsters I thought about are those that don't fit in - those who think differently from the majority, the people of exception, outsiders. I wish that society would place more importance and value on these kinds of monsters.

We have within us, from the start, that which will distinguish us from the vulgar herd.

Años poderosos les gustan los sicofantes, los iguales les estaban agradecidos por su amabilidad y los inferiores no deseaban otra cosa que servir a personas mas nobles y excepcionales.

Last time I checked, there is no 'Hall of Average.'

Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

But search the land of living men, Where wilt thou find their like again?