Second Rate Quotes - Page 4

• Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.

  Honore de Balzac

  Music, Two, Kind

  "Massimilla Doni" by Honore de Balzac, translated by Clara Bell and James Waring, 1839.

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• It was important to me to change the narrative. It's important because it has an impact on everything you do. It doesn't matter who you are or what business you are running. You would always be seen as some African from the bush trying to run a bank. But we do these things successfully and we shouldn't be seen as second rate. That is the message that we are putting out there.

  Mo Abudu

  Running, Impact, Important

  Source: www.ebony.com

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• It's a very obsessive profession that you need to stay obsessed to get anywhere, and it's very easy for us to get obsessed and then nothing else matters. I was reading Somerset Maugham's novella, Moon and Sixpense, about this artist based on Gauguin's life. It was so beautifully written. You must be first rate because second rate you might not survive. If you're an accountant, you'll survive second rate. If you chance it big, you may not get anywhere.

  Joan Chen

  Reading, Artist, Moon

  "Joan Chen and Amanda Schull Interview MAO’S LAST DANCER". collider.com. August 18, 2010.

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• I've often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life's vast lampshade like fireflies or moths.

  Francoise Sagan

  Firefly, People, Bangs

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• The pressure on language to deteriorate does not come merely from below, from the "democratic" lev-elers. It comes also from above, from the fancy jar-gonmongers, idle game players, fashionable coteries for second-rate intellectuals.

  John Simon

  Player, Games, Jars

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• Although most informed balletomanes would place artistry above technique, artistry without a strong technique is a flaccid, bloodless thing indeed, whereas technique without much artistry can still dazzle us in the manner of the circus or sports arena translated to a higher plane. Though the perfect blend of the two elements is the consummation devoutly to be wished, the real enemy of good ballet is not the slight preponderance of one or the other but the prevalence of pantomime--the turning of dance into second-rate theater.

  John Simon

  Sports, Strong, Real

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• Buddha and Christ were second-rate heroes. The greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. They put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools or systems in their name. They never create any stir but just melt down in love.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Hero, School, Men

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• We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Greatness, Civilization

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.115, Vintage

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• If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.

  Daniel Dennett

  Winning, Cheesy, Consciousness

  Daniel Clement Dennett (1998). “Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds”, p.158, MIT Press

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• The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.

  T Bone Burnett

  Ideas, Perfect, Anomalies

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• If an enterprise does not aspire to be the best of its kind, it will attract second-rate employees, and it will be soon forgotten.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Doe, Kind, Forgotten

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2004). “Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning”, p.17, Penguin

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• I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.

  John Boyne

  Memories, Book, Passion

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• Graham Wallas has reminded us that writing as compared with speaking involves an impression at the second remove and reading an impression at the third remove. The voice of a second-rate person is more impressive than the published opinion of superior ability.

  Harold Innis

  Reading, Writing, Voice

  Harold Adams Innis (2007). “Empire and Communications”, p.31, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.

  Jack Vance

  Art, Rate, Activity

  "Showboat World" by Jack Vance, DAW Books, (p. 111), 1981.

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• There is a rawness and a wonder to life. Pursue it. Hunt for it. Sell out to get it. Don't listen to the whines of those who have settled for a second-rate life and want you to do the same so they won't feel guilty. Your goal is not to live long; it's to live.

  Max Lucado

  Long, Goal, Want

  Max Lucado (1999). “He Still Moves Stones”, p.66, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.

  Agatha Christie

  Happiness, Success, Thinking

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• We admire predators - panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent.

  Marge Piercy

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Marge Piercy (2016). “The Longings of Women: A Novel”, p.351, Open Road Media

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• What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Depressing, Mediocrity, Way

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1958). “Letters of Ellen Glasgow”

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• Latin America can no longer tolerate being a haven for United States liberals who cannot make their point at home, an outlet for apostles too "apostolic" to find their vocation as competent professionals within their own community. The hardware salesman threatens to dump second-rate imitations of parishes, schools and catechisms -- out-moded even in the United States -- all around the continent. The traveling escapist threatens further to confuse a foreign world with his superficial protests, which are not viable even at home.

  Ivan Illich

  Latin, School, Home

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• It is always the sign of the second-rate man when the decision merely meets the present situation. It is the left-over in a decision which gives it its greatest value. It is the carry-over in the decision which helps develop the situation in the way we wish it to be developed. The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them; they have a vision of the future.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Past, Men, Visions Of The Future

  Mary Parker Follett (1957). “Dynamic administration: the collected papers of Mary Parker Follett”

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• the whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.

  Margaret Halsey

  Government, Quality, Ashes

  Margaret Halsey (1952). “The Folks at Home”

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• But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a kind of self-destructive shock one goes and does something really second-rate. Almost as if to prove it.

  Alison Lurie

  Thinking, Self, Doe

  Alison Lurie (2012). “Real People: A Novel”, p.146, Open Road Media

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

  Patrick Kavanagh

  Giving, Listening, Opinion

  Patrick Kavanagh (1973). “Collected Pruse”

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• There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Mediocrity, Speech, Painting

  "Of Books". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.

  Noam Chomsky

  Russia, Iran, Korea

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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