Mediocrity Quotes - Page 18

• An achievement-oriented culture is very pro-employee - it's so much more fun than one that isn't. Excellence is a tremendous amount of fun; mediocrity is not.

  Kip Tindell

  Fun, Smart, Achievement

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• Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

  Dorothy Day

  Names, Proud, Facts

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• I believe that mediocrity is self-inflicted and that genius is self-bestowed.

  Walter Russell

  Believe, Self, Secret

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• Minds of moderate caliber ordinarily condemn everthing which is beyond their range.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Mind, Range, Caliber

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• In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there.

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  Writing, Character, Fate

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• Media, the plural of mediocrity.

  Jimmy Breslin

  Fun, Media

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• You have to believe that you are the one who creates your success, that you are the one who creates your mediocrity, and that you are the one creating your struggle around money and success.

  T. Harv Eker

  Inspirational, Success, Trust

  FaceBook post by T. Harv Eker from Mar 26, 2013

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• A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Math, Paper, Dozen

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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• Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Writing, Dangerous, Critics

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• If you recall when [John] Kennedy passed an edict, 'Every person you hire in the Post Office must be African American,' the challenge with that is if all of a sudden, you are hired just because of the color of your skin, ability has nothing to do with it.And if ability has nothing to do with it, what does it do? It promotes mediocrity.

  Rafael Cruz

  Color, Office, African American

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• Mean-spirited mediocrities, especially those with a smattering of learning, are the most likely to be opinionated. Only strong minds know how to correct their opinions and abandon a bad position.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Strong, Mean, Learning

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• You cannot have people in your organization who are pessimists. They take you to mediocrity.

  Carlos Slim

  Organization, People, Pessimist

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• Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.

  Katherine Paterson

  Husband, Writing, School

  Katherine Paterson (2001). “The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children”, Dutton Juvenile

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• There is a certain hidden mediocrity in those who are stationed above us in life, an ability to take liberties in their pursuit of pleasures and diversions, without injuring the honor and respect we owe to them.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Life, Respect, Honor

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• If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose this poem is too soon for you. Return to your mediocrity, plug it into an amplifier and rethink yourself.

  Buddy Wakefield

  Purpose, Return, Plugs

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• The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.

  Edward Gibbon

  Lying, Passion, Opposites

  Edward Gibbon (1837). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.180

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• In business, what distinguishes leaders from laggards and greatness from mediocrity is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be.

  Robert Fritz

  Greatness, Leader, Imagine

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• Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over

  Seth Godin

  Careers, Errors, Effort

  Seth Godin (2012). “Whatcha Gonna Do with That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012”, p.27, Penguin

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• Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

  George E. P. Box

  Simple, Signatures, Scientist

  "Science and Statistics". Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 71, No. 356, (p. 792), December, 1976.

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• That Monica who's just gonna sit there in mediocrity... That Monica died in Samoa

  Monica Denise Brown

  Samoa, Monica, Died

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• I think there is a disrespect for the mind that Trump, for example, exemplifies. His is a kind of strategic thinking that's more about shrewdness than about intellect. His attack on "elites" is meant to rally his base to rebel against the powers that be - in Washington especially. I don't think he cares much about higher education per se; he just wants to demonstrate that learning isn't necessary for business or government. He wants to elevate mediocrity to a heroic virtue.

  Joan Wallach Scott

  Thinking, Disrespect, Mind

  Source: www.salon.com

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• I just wanted friends. I just wanted people to like me. I just wanted for things to be simple and good. So, for five years I actively sought out mediocrity.

  Evangeline Lilly

  Simple, Years, People

  Source: www.justjared.com

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• Attaining even mediocrity is often a struggle.

  Mason Cooley

  Struggle, Achievement

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• Artists and creative workers - people who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of the way to do things. They haven't been contented with mediocrity. They haven't confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others do them, but always a little better. Few are those who see with their own eyesand feel with their own hearts.

  Albert Einstein

  Heart, Artist, Track

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• I often ask myself: "What would Theodore Roosevelt do?" One can never know, of course. The ultimate contribution of consequential leaders is often their capacity to reframe issues in novel ways. That said, his leadership engaged, at a foundational level, whether the American "national character" would accept decline and mediocrity, or would go all-in for leadership and excellence. Amid the myriad of otherwise disconnected issues before us, that choice is emerging yet again.

  James M Strock

  Character, Choices, Leader

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