Ellen Glasgow Quotes

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

Washington is gripped by crab-in-the-bucket syndrome. And there's no cure in sight. Put a single crab in an uncovered bucket, and it will find a way to climb up and out on its own. Put a dozen crabs in a bucket, and 11 will fight with all their might to pull down the striver who attempts escape.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity...are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.

Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.

The business world worships mediocrity. Officially we revere free enterprise, initiative and individuality. Unofficially we fear it.

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

I think our Western society is very much about, 'Tuck your head in; make sure you're safe. Don't rock the boat.'

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

Politics is a herd mentality. Politicians don't really lead. Politicians reflect what they think is consensus opinion.

We live in an age of mediocrity.

The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

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

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Group conformity scares the pants off me because it's so often a prelude to cruelty towards anyone who doesn't want to - or can't - join the Big Parade.

The world chooses to think what the world thinks.

Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe, and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.