Top 100 Quotes About Second Rate
#1. There are times when we should, remember, the strange courage, of the second-rate who refuse to quit, when the nights, are black and long and sleepless, and the days are without, end.
Charles Bukowski
#2. Never be a second-rate version of someone else, be a first-rate version of yourself
Judy Garland
#3. The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. If a company is second rate, the logo will eventually be perceived as second rate. It is foolhardy to believe that a logo will do its job immediately, before an audience has been properly conditioned.
Paul Rand
#7. If an enterprise does not aspire to be the best of its kind, it will attract second-rate employees, and it will be soon forgotten.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#10. The things that I can't have I want, And what I have seems second-rate, The things I want to do I can't, And what I have to do I hate.
Don Marquis
#11. It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
Jorge Luis Borges
#12. There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
Christopher Bram
#13. Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive.
Mary Jane Ward
#14. I subscribed to the general theory that the worst room in the best hotel was better than the best room in a second-rate hotel.
Beatriz Williams
#15. The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.
T Bone Burnett
#16. The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes De Mille
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.
Gerald Finzi
#20. He must understand that if he is the world's finest plum and someone he loves does not like plums, he has the choice of becoming a banana. But he must be warned that if he chooses to become a banana, he will be a second rate banana. But he can always be the best plum.
Leo Buscaglia
#21. A book that I rate only second in importance in evolution theory to Darwin 's Origin (this as joined with its supplement Of Man), and also rate as undoubtedly one of the greatest books of the twentieth century
Ronald Fisher
#22. Pessimists are second rate people. They do not believe in life ... All they want to do is drag you down and appease their own feelings of mediocrity and fear.
Uell Stanley Andersen
#23. You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.
Maurice Ravel
#24. Buddha and Christ were second-rate heroes. The greatest men that ever live pass away unknown. They put forth no claims for themselves, establish no schools or systems in their name. They never create any stir but just melt down in love ...
Swami Vivekananda
#25. Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'.
Jeb Bush
#26. There are people who drive luxury cars, but have only second- or third-rate sofas in their homes. I put little trust in such people.
Haruki Murakami
#27. If we try to emulate the leadership style of others we perceive as successful, we end up being second-rate versions of someone else.
Henna Inam
#28. He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate ...
David Foster Wallace
#29. After 10 years TNA talent still have an inferiority complex. If you don't think that you work for the BEST COMPANY EVER then nobody else will! As a performer you hav to act and project that where you work is the pinnacle of competition! If not then the whole place just seems second rate.
Chris Jericho
#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. Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can't tell you.
Charles M. Schwab
#32. If the mortality rate seems high we must realize that Nature is a ruthless teacher. There are no second chances in Mother Nature's Survival Course.
William S. Burroughs
#33. She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.
W. Somerset Maugham
#35. A fine marksman is with a second rate rifle is far more effective than the reverse.
Jeff Cooper
#36. It wasn't a class system where I was the better guy and he was the second-rate guy. That was his role and my role was to play the solos. But he took great pride in his technique as a rhythm guitarist.
Wayne Kramer
#37. The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.
Oscar Wilde
#38. Second-rate knowledge, and middling talents, carry a man farther at courts, and in the busy part of the world, than superior knowledge and shining parts.
Lord Chesterfield
#39. Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can't have what you've got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don't rate it.
Robert A. Heinlein
#40. To keep any great nation up to a high standard of civilization there must be enough superior characters to hold the balance of power, but the very moment the balance of power gets into the hands of second-rate men and women, a decline of that nation is inevitable.
Christian D. Larson
#41. 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
#42. I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.
John Collier
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. I've always held that early marriage is a sure indication of second-rate goods that had to be sold in a hurry. - Martin Harris
L.M. Montgomery
#46. There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.
Luis Walter Alvarez
#47. Theoretically, I learned in physics that the universe is expanding at a rate of, like, forty-five miles a second, but it sure as shit doesn't feel that way when you're standing still.
Gayle Forman
#48. Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.
Horace
#49. If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Daniel Dennett
#50. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.
C.S. Lewis
#51. Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates
#52. First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
Leo Rosten
#53. Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.
Marjane Satrapi
#54. If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone's life rather than a worldclass version of your own
Donald O. Clifton
#55. 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
#56. Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second rate president.
Richard M. Nixon
#58. Somebody asked Somerset Maugham about his place in the pantheon of writers, and he said, "I'm in the very front row of the second rate." I'm sort of haunted by that.
Stephen King
#59. 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
#60. Never cut corners, or accept anything that's second-rate.
Bruce Oldfield
#61. The pressure on language to deteriorate does not come merely from below, from the "democratic" lev-elers. It comes also from above, from the fancy jar-gonmongers, idle game players, fashionable coteries for second-rate intellectuals.
John Simon
#62. You aren't ill: it is just that you are made of second-rate materials.
Natalia Ginzburg
#63. 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
#64. In 2013, Maryland had the second highest job creation rate of any state in the Mid Atlantic region - faster than both Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Martin O'Malley
#65. Joe Louis is the greatest heavyweight champion of all time. Rocky Marciano is second only to Louis. Where do I rate Ali? Somewhere below me. I beat him, and if I could beat him, no doubt Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano could have beaten him.
Joe Frazier
#66. All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.
Sam Houston
#67. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. I
G.H. Hardy
#68. 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
#69. Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
Honore De Balzac
#70. It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.
Steve Jobs
#71. Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage and two trillion transistors per second on the processing side.
George Dyson
#72. In an average person, ATP is produced at a rate of 9 x 1020 molecules per second, which equates to a turnover rate (the rate at which it is produced and consumed) of about 65 kg every day.
Nick Lane
#73. The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate - shall I say third-rate? - mind, Karl Marx.
H.G.Wells
#74. A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers.
Patrick Kavanagh
#75. 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
#76. Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of second-rate elegance ...
Hermann Hesse
#77. 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
#78. Often we had no choice: we couldn't reform the whole world. And didn't somebody once say 'Politics is the art of the possible'?" "Quite true - which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
#79. There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate.
Gustav Holst
#80. [ ... ]to be real
to become fluent, natural, to cut out the detour that sweeps us around what's fundamental to events, preventing us from touching their core: the detour that makes us all second-hand and second-rate.
Tom McCarthy
#81. If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period.
Bill Bryson
#82. When I was in the Army, the unit I served in, you could never stop. It was a volunteer unit, and there was a fairly high rate of attrition. The people who stayed through are the people who were either great at it or the people who just didn't know how to stop. And I fell into that second category.
Michael Arad
#83. World class is a phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment events, as well as a wide variety of insecure individuals, to assert that they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.
John Ralston Saul
#84. Every time I get a bit worried about having made some second rate choices in life I go back and read about the Suffragettes or William Wilberforce, people who were 'wrong' in their own time, and think, 'Ah well.'
Bob Brown
#86. Ribosomes have an error rate of about one letter in 10,000, far lower than the defect rate in our own high-quality manufacturing processes. And they operate at a rate of about 10 amino acids per second, building whole proteins with chains comprising hundreds of amino acids in less than a minute.
Nick Lane
#87. 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
#88. Graham Wallas has reminded us that writing as compared with speaking involves an impression at the second remove and reading an impression at the third remove. The voice of a second-rate person is more impressive than the published opinion of superior ability.
Harold Innis
#89. I know some first-class Negroes. I also know some second-rate white people.
Lesley Kagen
#90. In 1986, our commencement speaker was George Schultz, secretary of state, fourth in line to the president. You get me-basic cable's second most popular fake newsman. At this rate, the class of 2021 will be addressed by a zoo parrot in a mortar-board that has been trained to say congratulations.
Stephen Colbert
#91. I used to think that all my Wings stuff was second-rate stuff, but I began to meet younger kids, not kids from my Beatle generation, who would say, We really love this song.
Paul McCartney
#92. Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status ...
Stephen Harper
#93. 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
#94. I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.
Agatha Christie
#95. He thinks money spent on a home is money wasted. He's lived too much in hotels. Never the best hotels, of course. Second-rate hotels. He doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it. And yet, he wants a home. He's even proud of having this shabby place. He loves it here.
Eugene O'Neill
#96. It will help erase the idea that politics is a second-rate profession and a dirty business.
Robert Kennedy
#97. Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better).
G.H. Hardy
#98. Since then, I have worked with the group that commissioned and improved the ring and that is now preparing the construction of a second ring to increase the p stacking rate by an order of magnitude.
Simon Van Der Meer
#100. In the Mortality Bills, pneumonia is an easy second, to tuberculosis; indeed in many cities the death-rate is now higher and it has become, to use the phrase of Bunyan 'the captain of the men of death.'
William Osler
