Second-Rate Quotes (4 quotes)
Second Rate Quotes
Second Rate Quotes
André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That’s one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity.
In I Want to be a Mathematician: an Automathography (1985), 123.
I chucked the law for astronomy, and I knew that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered.
As quoted in Nicholas U. Mayall, Biographical Memoir, 'Edwin Powell Hubble: 1889—1953', Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (1970), Vol. 41, 179.
I want to get back again from Chemistry to Physics as soon as I can. The second-rate men seem to know their place so much better.
R. J. Strutt, John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh (1924), 222.
It’s better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science—it’s a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong.
Lecture at Wired 2013 (18 Oct 2013).