Lack of Originality Quotes

The politician who tries to ape his rival or predecessor is, almost by definition, a second rater, inferior to the real thing.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.

Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.

Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.

All military regimes use security as the reason why they should remain in power. It's nothing original.

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

I'm always cribbing from real life. I'm not a very creative filmmaker.

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking

Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only show the poverty of the borrower.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason. And the parrots of talk radio are just sending out the same stuff. When I look at my e-mails, I see the same Limbaugh rhetoric; apparently, people don't have any ideas of their own. And there's just this drumroll of anti-progressive thought.

There is nothing original; all is reflected light.

Some people rely on rumors and gossip because they are devoid of any original thought.

Weak minds think alike.

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

The difficulty with American television is it's pot luck.

Once you start copying other people's licks, you begin thinking they're yours. Doing that's just an easy way out.

When something is just bad, it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish.

The average mind is easily content with inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much easier to imitate than to create.

Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in. It's change you can Xerox.

Hard to believe there was ever a world leader as dumb as Donald Trump. Can't spell, can't read, has never managed anything approaching an original thought. His brain is like a radio playing at top volume, but between stations.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff...Basically what people want to hear is: I love you, you love me, the leaves turn brown, they fell off the trees, the wind is blowing, it got cold, you went away, my heart broke, you came back, and my heart was okay...Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear. Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass...If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them; when, in their turn, they begin to speak, they repeat to you with the greatest confidence, as if dealing with their own property, the things that they have heard you say yourself at some other place. A capable and superior look is the natural accompaniment of this type of character.