Mediocrity Quotes - page 10
Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture - but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.
Kenneth Rexroth
I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Vincent van Gogh
Wealth and speed are what the world admires, what each pursues. Railways, express mails, steamships and every possible facility for communications are the achievement in which the civilized world view and revels, only to languish in mediocrity by that very fact. Indeed, the effect of this diffusion is to spread the culture of the mediocre.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
And when did mediocrity become excellence in our country? Music is dead in 2011 because Lady Gaga lives. Really? Is that the best we can do? Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa, "Poker Face"? This stuttering, growling midget with a speech impediment is music? Really? This vapid, pop cancer, Madonna mini-me? She makes Miley Cyrus look like John Lennon. She makes Jack Lemon look like John Lennon. I'm sorry. And you don't get to claim you're not accepted at a billion hits on YouTube. And you're not an artist just cause you can wear a live chimpanzee as a bra. Lady Gaga is proof that David Bowie raped Carol Burnett.
Christopher Titus
We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a knowledge workers should not take on work, jobs and assignments. It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
Peter Drucker
Probability is a kind of penance, which God made, suitable, I presume to that state of mediocrity and probationership he has been pleased to place us in here wherein, to check our over-confidence and presumption, we might, by every day's experience, be made sensible of our short-sightedness, and liableness to error.
John Locke
After a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence.
John Ralston Saul
Reverence for greatness dies out, and is succeeded by base envy of greatness. Every man is in the way of many, either in the path to popularity or wealth. There is a general feeling of satisfaction when a great statesman is displaced, or a general, who has been for his brief hour the popular idol, is unfortunate and sinks from his high estate. It becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level.
We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress would take counsel with the wisest of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men seem never so scarce as when they are most needed, and small men never so bold to insist on infesting place, as when mediocrity and incapable pretence and sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly incompetency are most dangerous.
Albert Pike
Max Lerner, an educator, journalist and student of American civilization who was for many years a syndicated columnist for The New York Post, died yesterday... He was 89 ... Mr. Lerner was one of the more conspicuous of the post-World War II nonfiction writers, a humanist whose unabashed liberal conscience led him to the political barricades for more than three decades. Many of his concerns now seem prescient. In 1959, for example, in a speech at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Lerner called for the formation of an antiwar elite, making it clear that he was worried about what he saw as growing mediocrity among American students.
Max Lerner
Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own-they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal- for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them-while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.
John Galt
