Hector Hugh Munro Quotes

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

I go too fast to see much, only the tops of everything. I've got to prowl slow some time through this country.

Our economy is a hundred times better, than the average African economy. Outside South Africa, what country is [as good as] Zimbabwe?.. What is lacking now are goods on the shelves - that is all.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

In my heart I know you didn't come here just for me, you came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect union.

Now, if the Standard Oil Company were the only concern in the country guilty of the practices which have given it monopolistic power, this story never would have been written. Were it alone in these methods, public scorn would long ago have made short work of the Standard Oil Company. But it is simply the most conspicuous type of what can be done by these practices. The methods it employs with such acumen, persistency, and secrecy are employed by all sorts of business men, from corner grocers up to bankers. If exposed, they are excused on the ground that this is business.

Mediocrity is gonna kill the world before Armageddon ever does.

If other countries don't impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage...we would look at considering perhaps duties that would offset that cost.

I always say that in investing you want to buy stock in a company that has a business that's so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will. We have a country like that.

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity's a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

If the spirit of business adventure is dulled, this country will cease to hold the foremost position in the world.

What I know for sure is that behind every catastrophe, there are great lessons to be learned. Among the many that we as a country need to get is that as long as we play the "us and them" game, we don't evolve as people, as a nation, as a planet.

We can't be in the business of carting fresh air around the country.

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.

He did nothing in particular, and did it very well.

I think it is possible for the world to see a Palestinian state - I'm not going to put a time frame on it - that is contiguous, that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life.

All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.

You see yourself as very average, ordinary. And there is nothing ordinary about you, Rachel." (Something Borrowed)

I perfected the art of being uninteresting.

We're as average as everyday's wash.

In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.

It wasn't what we needed then that was hurting us, it was what we was paying for that we had already used up. The country was just buying gasoline for a leaky tank. Everything was going into a gopher hole and you couldent see where you was going to get any of it back.

If something isn't special, then it's ordinary.

Mediocrity has no greater consolation than in the thought that genius is not immortal.