Quotes About Merit

Those who are greatest in civic excellence—not the wealthiest, or the most numerous, or the most handsome—are the ones who merit the greatest share of political recognition and influence.

Ungenerous to the losers and oppressive to the winners, merit becomes a tyrant.

If I am responsible for having accrued a handsome share of worldly goods—income and wealth, power and prestige—I must deserve them. Success is a sign of virtue. My affluence is my due.

But beyond fairness and productivity, the liberal argument also gestured toward a third, more potent ideal implicit in the case for markets: Enabling people to compete solely on the basis of effort and talent would bring market outcomes into alignment with merit. In a society where opportunities were truly equal, markets would give people their just deserts.

by making clear what is true in any case, that those who land on top do not make it on their own but owe their good fortune to family circumstance and native gifts that are morally akin to the luck of the draw.

But differences of talent are as morally arbitrary as differences of class.23

Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites. More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit. And the complaint is justified.

It is not my doing that the market prizes the talents I have, or that I possess those talents in the first place.

But our disagreements about merit are not only about fairness. They are also about how we define success and failure, winning and losing—and about the attitudes the winners should hold toward those less successful than themselves. These are highly charged questions, and we try to avoid them until they force themselves upon us.

Tenemos que preguntarnos si la solución a nuestro inflamable panorama político es llevar una vida más fiel al principio del mérito o si, por el contrario, debemos encontrarla en la búsqueda de un bien común más allá de tanta clasificación y tanto afán de éxito.

It points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

The only entitlement guaranteed should be the fruits of one's own labor.

the Inventing merit badge, which required a Scout to not only invent a new device or mechanism but also to obtain a U.S. patent for it. Needless to say, not many Scouts ever attempted this badge during its four-year existence and it is something of a miracle that nine Scouts managed to earn it.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

Instead of assigning grades according to merit, plan to simply add all my student's scores together and divide by the total number of students. Since I grade on a bell curve, this means that every student---every semester in every class---will receive a grade of 'C'. Nothing would please Karl Marx more than knowing that regardless of talent or effort everyone will get the same outcome in my classes.

Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." MARK TWAIN (1835–1910) US

If life was fair, we'd get treated the way the we treat others and if life was fair, we'd get paid exactly what we are worth. And in the end, we'd all get exactly what we deserve. So, son, maybe it's better if life isn't fair. Sometimes I'm thankful that life isn't fair.

The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity.

I happen to believe that no one inherently deserves anything, except basic human rights, and not to have to watch an ad before you watch a trailer on YouTube.

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the pre-eminence of family.

Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit.

Everything is equally endowed with great merit, so that it is no longer an honor to be lauded.

He makes his cook his merit, and the world visits his dinners and not him.