Quotes About Comparison

People can only live with their equals, and not even with them; for in the long run they cannot tolerate that someone is their equal.

No one enjoys being equal.

Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

Envy, bleating 'I'm as good as you', is the hotbed of Fascism.

EQUAL RIGHTS and FREE DISCUSSION will be fearlessly advocated and maintained. Sectarian dogmas or tenets will be investigated and compared.

Achieve some perfection [excellence] yourself, so that you may not fall into sorrow by seeing the perfection in others.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

We should allow others' excellences, to preserve a modest opinion of our own.

All human excellence is but comparative — there are persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.

The mediocre always feel as if they're fighting for their lives when confronted by the excellent.

Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.

The fact is, the difference between peak performers and everybody else are much smaller than everybody else thinks.

Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own

A brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence.

Do not confuse excellence with perfection. The first is possible to achieve, the second is probably not.

It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.

Can you know excellence if you've never seen it? Can you know good if you have seen only bad?

Where you see valid achievements or virtue being attacked, it's by someone viewing them as a mirror of their own inadequacy instead of an inspiring beacon for excellence.

For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever

Personally, I always felt times aren't so excellent as are performances.

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

I don't like to compare years, honestly. I think every year is a different experience, a different challenge. You grow. You evolve as a person and as a player.

To hear that your neighbor was worse off than yourself was not an altogether unpleasant experience.