#mediocrity

The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve. ↗

— Hugh Trevor-Roper

#function #genius #give #mediocrity #new

...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night! ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#giftedness #mediocrity #communication

Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making. ↗

— Fred Allen

#carbon #little #little men #making #mediocrity

We live in an age of mediocrity. ↗

— Lauren Bacall

#live #mediocrity

Beauty he loved for its own sake; ugliness, which more often than not was a form of inverted beauty, fascinated him. Life offered far too little of either, and far too much appalling mediocrity, which he thought hideous. ↗

— Lloyd Biggle Jr.

#life #mediocrity #ugliness #ugly #beauty

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity trust upon them. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#men

Some people are born mediocre, some people achieve mediocrity, and some people have mediocrity thrust upon them. ↗

— Joseph Heller

#born #mediocre #mediocrity #people #some

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. ↗

— Jackie Cooper

#dying #good #good work #half-hour #hope

Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all. ↗

— Jonathan Kozol

#be true #been #contempt #deal #demoralized

Mechanization best serves mediocrity. ↗

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#mediocrity #serves