A Quote by Elizabeth Hardwick

the great is seldom a deterrent to the mediocre

Elizabeth Hardwick

Quote Topics

Deterrent Great Mediocre Seldom

Quote Author

Elizabeth Hardwick
American - Novelist
July 27, 1916 - December 2, 2007

In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.

Jim McKelvey

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results.

Bertrand Russell

There's mediocre jazz, mediocre salesmen, mediocre golfers. If you want to be good, you have to really hone your skills.

Jason Moran

Just as the great composer is seldom also a great player, so is the great mathematician seldom also a great teacher.

Christopher Robin Milne

I would always rather do a mediocre script with a great filmmaker than a great script with a mediocre filmmaker.

Kirsten Dunst

Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

Albert Einstein

You can give a great film idea to a mediocre team and they may screw it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will turn it into a great film.

Edwin Catmull

It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creatingfuture dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

Bertrand Russell

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

Agnes Repplier

Virtually every subject is most effectively learned directly from the greatest thinkers, historians, artists, philosophers, scientists, prophets and their original works. Great works inspire greatness. Mediocre or poor works inspire mediocre or poor learning. The great accomplishments of humanity are the key to quality education.

Oliver DeMille

You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.

Denis Leary

It is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree....I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.

Albert Pierrepoint

Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge--criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment--three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are.

Horace Walpole

Mediocre products with great sales teams always beat great products with mediocre sales teams.

Donal Daly

[I]t is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success.