Underachievement Quotes

#1. As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.

Zadie Smith

#2. Underachievement is widely accepted in the popular culture, which puts little value on persistence in the face of setbacks or on the unique pleasure of working long and hard on something personally important.

Kenneth W. Christian

#3. We must recognize that all the civil rights laws in the world are not going to solve the problem of minority underachievement. Ultimately, blacks and Hispanics are going to have to see that their solution is largely in their own hands.

Richard Lamm

#4. Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.

Martin Seligman

#5. Remember that our Spanish conquerors, for their own benefit, deliberately created an oppressed underclass whose collective psyche became rooted in passivity and underachievement.

Lionel Sosa

#6. I believe hip hop is being used in some mass way to influence underachievement.

Cee Lo Green

#7. The primary reason for underachievement and failure is that the great majority of people don't decide to be successful.

Brian Tracy

#8. The debate that I'm interested in having is with seriously smart people about how we design institutions in the 21st century that will genuinely address problems of poverty and educational underachievement.

Niall Ferguson

#9. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

Charles Darwin

#10. We are in our Self. We are not in the world.

Ramana Maharshi

#11. A fish tank is just interactive television for cats.

Oliver Gaspirtz

#12. Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

Vikram Seth

#13. It's not so much what you have to learn if you accept weird theories, it's what you have to UNlearn.

Isaac Asimov

#14. What kind of hard SF do I write? Everything from near-future, Earth-centric techno-thrillers to far-future, far-flung interstellar epics.

Edward M. Lerner

#15. I'm not one of those Hollywood moms where my kid is three weeks old and I'm a size zero. I'm a real woman and I'm a working woman and a working mom.

Kimora Lee Simmons

#16. When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

Dave Brubeck

#17. Remember we're all in this alone.

Lily Tomlin

#18. NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell.

Ivan Doig

#19. The Russian empire under czars and commissars has been hard to deal with for other countries.

Henry A. Kissinger

#20. The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.

Raymond Carver