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. Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.
Alexis Herman
#4. The Interest Rate Reduction Act takes a first step toward providing critical stability by eliminating the threat of an immediate interest rate increase, while making clear the need to move toward a long-term solution that serves the best interests of taxpayers and borrowers.
John Kline
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. It's always fascinating - and sometimes a little disquieting - when two first-rate critics violently disagree.
Robert Gottlieb
#11. 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
#12. That's why," he said speaking with averted face, "I wanted to do something first. I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn't absolutely un-worthy. I wanted to do something.
Aldous Huxley
#13. I can get on with wild beasts first-rate; but men rile me awfully ...
Louisa May Alcott
#14. You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.
Anna Quindlen
#15. It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.
Peter Drucker
#16. A theatre receives recognition through its initiative, which is indispensable for first-rate performances.
Franz Liszt
#17. Even after all these years, finding a really first-rate story is still a thrill, one I want to share with others.
Gardner Dozois
#18. A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.
P.M.S. Blackett
#19. Within me, I knew I would never be a first-rate producer. I wasn't tough enough.
Dominick Dunne
#21. The exchange rate between first-world lives and third-world lives in disaster stories in the media is about 50:1.
Craig Reucassel
#22. 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
#23. The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.
Benito Mussolini
#24. 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
#25. Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. 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
#27. We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
Evelyn Waugh
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Groupon's model: Getting the group discount rate first, finding the group second. The daily deal goes out and, if a minimum number of people sign up, they can all share in the group rate. Vendor gets customers, customers get a discount, Groupon gets a cut.
Rachel Sklar
#31. 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
#32. But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.
Gerald Finzi
#33. For the first time we can perceive something of the real proportion of features and events on the stage of the whole world, and may seek a formula which shall express certain aspects, at any rate, of geographical causation in universal history.
Halford Mackinder
#34. You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.
Maurice Ravel
#35. 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
#36. The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
#37. 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
#38. I vividly remember my first day on the White House staff. My office, of course, was in the Old Executive Office Building. I didn't rate one in the West Wing; but don't try to tell me or any of the rest of us working there that we weren't working in the White House.
John Roberts
#39. I'm from Indiana, the home of more first-rate second-class men than any other state in the union.
Thomas R. Marshall
#40. 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
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. One person's success is another's first step, only you can rate your achievements and find peace within yourself.
Robert Zeidan
#45. 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
#46. As horrible as jail was, there were some first-rate guys in there.
Scott Weiland
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. The first-rate mind is always curious, compassionate, original, and pessimistic.
Mignon McLaughlin
#50. Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
#51. In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.
Hugo Rossi
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
Leo Rosten
#59. You become like that, what you admire most. By admiring excellence and practicing, it can boost you to become excellent.
Mark LaMoure
#60. His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.
Hugh Laurie
#61. 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.
#62. 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
#63. There are very few humorists who have written first-rate humor after they've become elderly.
Richard Armour
#65. As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you're going to be a second-rate artist.
Margaret Atwood
#66. There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a tenth-rate executive.
B.C. Forbes
#67. For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
Wyndham Lewis
#68. To be able to be there first, I love the pioneer thing. It's exciting to me. And they pay full rate, they're really nice, they support the work, and they said yes. What could be bad? It's the Wild West. You can do what you want.
Jenji Kohan
#69. The night was a magnificent confirmation of "women and children first," yet somehow the loss rate was higher for Third Class children than First Class men.
Walter Lord
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. To be first-rate at anything you have to stake your all. Nobody's an artist 'on the side'.
Eleanor Clark
#74. If you intend to take the journey of mastery, the best thing you can do is to arrange for first-rate instruction.
George Leonard
#75. I think I was about twenty-five when I first said - more or less to myself - that I was quite a good second-rate poet. I repeated it aloud in a Guardian interview in 1976, and some people thought I was a coy old thing.
John Pudney
#76. If you can, you will quickly find that the greatest rate of return you will earn is on your own personal spending. Being a smart shopper is the first step to getting rich.
Mark Cuban
#77. I still rate the bit in the first 'Tomb Raider' where the T Rex comes round the end of the valley and roars as one of the most awesome gaming experiences, and I still adore 'Tomb Raider' for putting that in my life.
Rhianna Pratchett
#78. The best form of welfare for the troops is first-rate training.
Erwin Rommel
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Everything should be first-rate in a person, his face, clothes, soul and thoughts.
Anton Chekhov
#84. 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
#85. The intensely felt subjective image is always the reason for making a first rate picture.
Henry Holmes Smith
#86. A first-rate marriage is like a first-rate hotel: expensive, but worth it.
Mignon McLaughlin
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Documentarian Laura Poitras has crafted a first-rate Hitchcockian-type thriller telling the story of Edward Snowden.
Leonard Maltin
#90. In Formula One, the car can make a difference in a way that a driver cannot. Whereas Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna spent their early seasons in second-rate machinery, Hamilton walked into the equal best car on the grid. His first season none the less has, by any standards, been extraordinary.
Martin Jacques
#91. 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
#92. The Window is not without a certain visual spell that makes it a first-rate artistic achievement.
Andrew Sarris
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so.
Athanasius
#97. A company invites their employees to sign up for a plan where every time they get a raise, some part of that raise goes to increasing their contribution rate to the 401k plan. In the first company we convinced to adopt this plan, saving rates tripled.
Richard Thaler
#98. A person's first duty, a young person's at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.
G.H. Hardy
#99. 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
#100. I know some first-class Negroes. I also know some second-rate white people.
Lesley Kagen
