Standards Quotes

“I have watched constantly that in our work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether my productions deal with fable or with stories of living action.”

“As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.”

“People always try to be perfect. That's why they don't start anything. Perfection is the lowest standard in the world. Because if you're trying to be perfect, you know you can't be. So what you really have is a standard you can never achieve. You want to be outstanding, not perfect.”

“I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.”

“The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education?”

“It is amazing how many people think they are doing blacks a favor by exempting them from standards that others are expected to meet.”

“The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.”

“Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.”

“The stricter standards and independent, often conclusive, evidence in the physical sciences cannot be generalized to intellectual activity as a whole, even though the aura of scientific processes and results is often appropriated by other intellectuals.”

“Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.”

“Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.”

“Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?”

“Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.”

“We don't settle for anything less than excellence.”

“Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold”

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

“There is nothing more frustrating than a good example.”

“Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.”

“I have a simple taste, only the best.”

“I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

“I don't yell at people, I don't mistreat people. I don't talk down to people, so no one else in this building, in this vicinity, has the right to do it.”

“Adequacy is the enemy of excellence.”

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.”

“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

“No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the only judge... There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.”