Quotes About Comparison

Let us compete with ourselves, not with others.

The difference between reading a good book and Facebook, is that a good book is always hard to put down, whereas on Facebook it's become too easy to put anyone down.

Now we live in fairyland. The only lightly disappointing thing about this land is that it is smaller than the real world has ever been.

Flutter like a hummingbird, Dive like an eagle, Ain't no bird that's my equal. - Twilight

In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Murphy Brown is doing better than I am. At least she knows she still has a job next year.

Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

Walter Mondale has all the charisma of a speed bump.

Why, this fellow doesn't know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.

I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.

They wanted me to be a Washington.

Keynesians are to economics what witch doctors are to medicine.

Did you ever see that painting the Mona Lisa. It always reminds me of a reporter listening to a politician.

...one is reminded that [John Kerry, D-MA] really just a better-looking Ted Kennedy, a richer Michael Dukakis.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

No one is better at not beating America than England.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

These tanks were like a good rent-a-car.

Comparison is an act of violence against the self.