Top 100 First Rate Quotes
#1. He is a first-rate collector who can, upon all occasions, collect his wits.
George D. Prentice
#2. Never be a second-rate version of someone else, be a first-rate version of yourself
Judy Garland
#3. Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery.
Ernest Rutherford
#4. Throughout the past century there has always existed a significant minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims. In fact, the number of biologists who have expressed some degree of disillusionment is practically endless.
Michael Denton
#5. If you dry the chestnut, both the barks being taken away, beat them into powder and make the powder up into an electuary with honey, it is a first-rate remedy for cough and spitting of blood.
Nicholas Culpeper
#6. If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have escaped containment and burned through a
David Quammen
#7. I want a more difficult life, that's all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It's to do with me, not you; so don't worry.
Julian Barnes
#8. It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.
Robert Gottlieb
#9. The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
A.A. Milne
#10. I can get on with wild beasts first-rate; but men rile me awfully ...
Louisa May Alcott
#11. You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
Anna Quindlen
#12. It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
Peter Drucker
#13. A theatre receives recognition through its initiative, which is indispensable for first-rate performances.
Franz Liszt
#14. Even after all these years, finding a really first-rate story is still a thrill, one I want to share with others.
Gardner Dozois
#15. A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.
P.M.S. Blackett
#16. Within me, I knew I would never be a first-rate producer. I wasn't tough enough.
Dominick Dunne
#18. Ought to be havin' a first-rate eddication, at their age. When I was their age I was doin' all this Latin and stuff
T.H. White
#19. More than anything else, a budget request is a statement of national priorities; a clear enumeration of what our country needs to grow its economy and remain in the future the first-rate power it is today.
Roy Blunt
#20. Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.
George Bernard Shaw
#21. It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation.
David Sarnoff
#22. We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
Evelyn Waugh
#23. I think that, by comparison with $2,000 bottles of grand cru Burgundies, first-rate barolos, which sell for under $100, are undervalued ten-fold.
Joe Bastianich
#24. What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
Doris Lessing
#25. The test of a first-rate work, and a test of your sincerity in calling it a first-rate work, is that you finish it.
Arnold Bennett
#26. But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.
Gerald Finzi
#27. You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.
Maurice Ravel
#28. Hezekiah Pendergast," Constance continued, "was the great-great-grandfather of Aloysius - and a first-rate mountebank. He began his career as a snake-oil salesman for traveling medicine shows and, over time, devised his own 'medicine': Hezekiah's Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative.
Douglas Preston
#29. I set out to become the greatest lover in Vienna, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the greatest economist in the world. Alas, for the illusions of youth: as a horseman, I was never really first-rate.
Joseph A. Schumpeter
#30. I'm from Indiana, the home of more first-rate second-class men than any other state in the union.
Thomas R. Marshall
#31. We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad ...
Evelyn Waugh
#32. If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour.
Charlotte Bronte
#34. Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. Having told the truth for years as a first-rate reporter, Jason Leopold now comes completely clean about himself and also sheds light on his imperiled profession. A riveting account of just how hard the truth can be.
Mark Crispin Miller
#36. As horrible as jail was, there were some first-rate guys in there.
Scott Weiland
#37. A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson's biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It's first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing.
F. Sionil Jose
#38. Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
William Faulkner
#39. The first-rate mind is always curious, compassionate, original, and pessimistic.
Mignon McLaughlin
#40. When I teach writing, I have a mantra: 'Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.'
David Morrell
#41. No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.
Walter Bagehot
#42. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.
Henry David Thoreau
#43. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Hanna Arendt
#44. A good part of the trick to being a first-rate scientist is in asking the right questions or asking them in ways that make it possible to find answers.
Anne Roe
#46. First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
Leo Rosten
#47. Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#48. Shame...is a first rate form of social control. Shame is what keeps us in line, what prevents us from discovering not so much who we are, but what we might become.
Michael Bronski
#49. There are very few humorists who have written first-rate humor after they've become elderly.
Richard Armour
#50. There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a tenth-rate executive.
B.C. Forbes
#51. For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
Wyndham Lewis
#52. When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#53. One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
Nicholas Kristof
#54. If you go to a second-rate place, and you are first-rate, it is very difficult to do first-rate work because you do not get that critical feedback you need for first-rate work on a daily basis.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
#55. To be first-rate at anything you have to stake your all. Nobody's an artist 'on the side'.
Eleanor Clark
#56. If you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.
George Leonard
#57. The best form of welfare for the troops is first-rate training.
Erwin Rommel
#58. Every man who can be a first-rate something
as every man can be who is a man at all
has no right to be a fifth-rate something; for a fifth-rate something is not better than a first-rate nothing.
J.G. Holland
#59. When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.
Thomm Quackenbush
#60. I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.
Witold Gombrowicz
#61. Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.
Ben Bagdikian
#62. Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.
Anton Chekhov
#63. Dan Spainhour is a terrific coach and educator. I had the pleasure of working several years with him, and I know that his knowledge and enthusiasm are first-rate.
Tommy Amaker
#64. The intensely felt subjective image is always the reason for making a first rate picture.
Henry Holmes Smith
#65. A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel: expensive, but worth it.
Mignon McLaughlin
#66. No matter what happens in a child's home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there's no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything.
Jonathan Kozol
#67. Of the second-rate leaders people speak respectfully saying, "He has done this, he has done that." Of the first-rate leaders, they do not say this. They say, "We have done it all ourselves."
Laozi
#68. Documentarian Laura Poitras has crafted a first-rate Hitchcockian-type thriller telling the story of Edward Snowden.
Leonard Maltin
#69. I would never have expected anything that I did would ever appear in first-rate museums around the world. That was just a choice that I made, very early on. I was interested mainly in the entertainment arts. I wasn't as interested in being a fine artists.
Rick Heinrichs
#70. The Window is not without a certain visual spell that makes it a first-rate artistic achievement.
Andrew Sarris
#71. Competition [in a scene] is healthy. Competition is life. Yet most actors refuse to acknowledge this. They don't want to compete. They want to get along. And they are therefore not first-rate actors.
Michael Shurtleff
#72. Atlantic's Jerry Wexler believes first-rate records are made by first-rate voices. He certainly has worked with enough of them: Clyde McPhatter, Joe Turner, La Vern Baker, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin.
Jon Landau
#74. Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn't, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?
Robertson Davies
#75. It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science
it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong, joked Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and the former president of the Royal Society, at Wired 2013.
Martin J. Rees
#76. There's always a 'but' when it comes to jobs. Like, I love my job but my colleagues are first-rate, but ... a couple of them like to dress like superheroes on the weekend and I can't help but wonder if they're nuts. - Logan
Nicholas Sparks
#78. Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual - in his phrase, "someone who reads books" - the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.
Steven Pressfield
#79. F. Scott Fitzgerald has an indespensible quote: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at once and still retain the ability to function'. Or, as I like to call it, 'O.J. killed his wife, and the police are corrupt.'
Bill Maher
#80. I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He's got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.
Wes Anderson
#81. Deeply affecting and compulsively readable, The Fifty-First State displays Lisa Borders' emotional acuity, first-rate skills as a storyteller, and profound empathy not only for her two compelling main characters but for an oft-neglected region and a disappearing way of life.
Christopher Castellani
#82. First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James
#83. A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
Arnold Bennett
#84. Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?
Maurice Ravel
#85. The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experience. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
Willa Cather
#86. First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.
Andre Weil
#87. Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.
Judy Garland
#88. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
Norman Mailer
#89. There is no second place for doing first rate work.
Jeffrey Fry
#90. To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate.
Heraclitus
#91. First rate magician perform first rate magic effects, second rate magician performs third rate magic effects.
Amit Kalantri
#92. As is the inventor of murder, and the father of art, Cain must have been a man of first-rate genius.
Thomas De Quincey
#93. We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.
George Bernard Shaw
#94. It's a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don't know of any first-rate artist who hasn't manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.
Mark Van Doren
#95. I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
John Updike
#96. It's often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science - it's far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.
Martin Rees
#97. Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.
Alan Bradley
#98. It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.
Gilbert Ryle
#99. I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
Richard Strauss
#100. There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden
