Mediocrity Quotes
Most popular mediocrity quotes
Mediocrity is the best drug for enslaving the people.
Middleness is the very enemy of the bold.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.
It isn't evil that's running the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.
Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.
Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.
Democracy, that festival of mediocrity.
It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.
The mediocre always feel as if they're fighting for their lives when confronted by the excellent.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
Aspiring only to second-place goals is a first-rate way to hedge our bets. Among the least appreciated reasons for doing superficial, second-rate work of any kind is the comfort of knowing that it's not our best that's on the line.
Greatness is always envied—it is only mediocrity that can boast of a host of friends.
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.
Fortunately there is excess in greatness: it can lose more than mediocrity possesses, and still be great.
Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.
What is responsible for the success of many works is the rapport between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and the mediocrity of the public's.
It is a great sign of mediocrity to praise always moderately.
Attaining even mediocrity is often a struggle.
Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Mediocrity is safe.
Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process.... You're always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.
A brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence.
To me, the only sin is mediocrity.
"Elitism" is the slur directed at merit by mediocrity.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.
Mediocrity is excellence to the mediocre.
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!
It is the habit of mediocre minds to condemn all that is beyond their grasp.
Intolerance of mediocrity has been the main prop of my independence.
When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.
To the mediocre, mediocrity is a form of happiness.
"Mediocrity" does not mean an average intelligence; it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.
One form of the death wish is the embracing of mediocrity.
It isn't evil that is ruining the earth, but mediocrity.
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
Mediocrity always detests ability, and loathes genius.
To the mediocre, mediocrity appears great.
