Quotes About Second-rate

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armor to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.

The caught murderer is necessarily one of the failures. He is second-rate.

Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

Shakespeare It is fair, though hardly very important, that to say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best.

Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn't, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?

Secondrateness comes out of his pores like a fog.

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place.

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.

Potterism is worst of all in America, that great home of commerce, success and the booming of the second rate.

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

Real rebels are rarely anything but second rate outside their rebellion; the drain of time and temper is ruinous to any other accomplishment.

Because politics is the science of the possible, it only appeals to second-rate minds. The first raters only interested in the impossible

Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue.

I really found this campaign odious. I couldn't get up for it. The quality of the candidates and the campaign, I just found the whole thing second-rate. I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush.

All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.

To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts out, have condemned himself to second-rate thoughts, and to second-rate friends

One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories.

A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers.