John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.

Radio is a bag of mediocrity where little men with carbon minds wallow in sluice of their own making.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

If the people dig it, then I dig it. If the people wanna hear it, then I wanna play it.

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Mechanization best serves mediocrity.

The masses, the public, is too strict.

There's a lot of schlock out there.

In every generation, there's a strong tendency for everyone to think like everyone else.

I don't get too much work to begin with, and whatever I get is mostly not good enough.

A good number of works owe their success to the mediocrity of their authors' ideas, which match the mediocrity of those of the general public.

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the idiot is all about. The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity.

Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the library. And - since women are a majority of the population - we'd all be married to Mel Gibson.

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

Dreck is dreck and no amount of fancy polish is going to make it anything else.

To write good SF today...you must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.