Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

I'm afraid of being average. I have a real fear of being just another linebacker.

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

The average is that which no person quite ever is.

Expectations were pretty low and they are meeting them.

Ain't no man can avoid being average, but there ain't no man got to be common.

There is nothing worse than being mediocre at a whole bunch of different things.

They called me 'Mr. Average' in school.

This is the age othe common man, they tell us-a title which any man may claim to the extent osuch distinction as he has managed not to achieve.

If everybody has a voice, then you end up with something average.

I'm not the best of you, but I'm not the worst either.

The truth is that most people have a better chance to be uncommon by effort than by natural gifts. Anyone could give that effort in his or her chosen endeavor, but the typical person doesn't, choosing to do only enough to get by.

There is, indeed, nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one's own, to be precisely "like other people.

Mediocrity is gonna kill the world before Armageddon ever does.

For what level of mediocrity will you settle?

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.

I wanted to be, you know, just no different than anybody else.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Sir, the slowness of genius is hard to bear, but the slowness of mediocrity is insufferable.

Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.

Most people are such fools that it is really no great compliment to say that someone is above the average.

Our party's most outstanding mediocrity.

We encourage one another in mediocrity.

There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.

Until our mission becomes our obsession, we'll be chained to the realm of average.

Don't do anything that you're already not great at doing.