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. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#9. 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
#10. It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
Jorge Luis Borges
#11. There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate.
Christopher Bram
#12. Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive.
Mary Jane Ward
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.
Agnes De Mille
#16. 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
#17. But no work from a first rate mind is ever really second rate.
Gerald Finzi
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.
Maurice Ravel
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. A fine marksman is with a second rate rifle is far more effective than the reverse.
Jeff Cooper
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer.
John Collier
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets' being second-rate.
Horace
#39. If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.
Daniel Dennett
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
Leo Rosten
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Nothing would please the Kremlin more than to have the people of this country choose a second rate president.
Richard M. Nixon
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Never cut corners, or accept anything that's second-rate.
Bruce Oldfield
#51. 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
#52. You aren't ill: it is just that you are made of second-rate materials.
Natalia Ginzburg
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. I
G.H. Hardy
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers.
Patrick Kavanagh
#60. 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
#61. Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of second-rate elegance ...
Hermann Hesse
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate.
Gustav Holst
#65. [ ... ]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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I know some first-class Negroes. I also know some second-rate white people.
Lesley Kagen
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. It will help erase the idea that politics is a second-rate profession and a dirty business.
Robert Kennedy
#78. 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
#80. You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.
John Buchan
#81. I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.
Jack Vance
#82. If Richard Nixon was second-rate, what in the world is third-rate?
Joseph Heller
#83. The whole flavor and quality of the American representative government turns to ashes on the tongue, if one regards that government as simply an inferior and rather second-rate sort of corporation.
Margaret Halsey
#84. First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art.
Clive James
#85. The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.
Stephen Neill
#86. Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90 percent of the time they've transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?
Kurt Cobain
#87. Why become a second-rate Ravel when you're already a first-rate Gershwin?
Maurice Ravel
#88. But I think that sometimes, when one's behaved like a rather second-rate person, the way I did at breakfast, then in a kind of self-destructive shock one goes and does something really second-rate. Almost as if to prove it ...
Alison Lurie
#89. 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
#90. First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.
Andre Weil
#91. Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.
Judy Garland
#92. I never tried to emulate my father. Anyone trying to do that would be a second-rate carbon copy.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
#93. First rate magician perform first rate magic effects, second rate magician performs third rate magic effects.
Amit Kalantri
#94. What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.
Ellen Glasgow
#95. I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.
Sarah Waters
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Stuffed vine leaves tend to burn and/or stick when you cook them. To avoid this, use a heavy based pan lined with a few layers of second-rate leaves.
Yotam Ottolenghi
#99. Real rebels are rarely anything but second rate outside their rebellion; the drain of time and temper is ruinous to any other accomplishment.
James Gould Cozzens
#100. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn't hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?
Richard K. Morgan
