mediocrity

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

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

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Recently, in my opinion, there has been too much talk about the Common Man. It has been dinned into us that this is the Century of the Common Man. The idea seems to be that the Common Man has come into his own at last. But I have never been able to find out who this is. In fact, most Americans will get mad and fight if you try calling them common. . . . I have never met a father and mother who did not want their children to grow up to be uncommon men and women. May it always be so. For the future of America rests not in mediocrity, but in the constant renewal of leadership in every phase of our national life.

Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.