Words matter. These are the best First-Rate Quotes from famous people such as Gardner Dozois, Nicholas Kristof, Wes Anderson, Jon Lovett, Dominick Dunne, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Even after all these years, finding a really first-rate story is still a thrill, one I want to share with others.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He’s got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. That’s what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential and aware of your inexperience.
Within me, I knew I would never be a first-rate producer. I wasn’t tough enough.
My family is blue-collar – coal miners and steelworkers. My father was an automobile mechanic, and us boys were brought up to work. I used to pump gasoline at 11 cents a gallon. I thought I would like to be a first-rate mechanic; a respected, hard-working man.
What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn’t got plenty of good common sense, the more science he has, the worse for his patient.
It’s often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science – it’s far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.
When I teach writing, I have a mantra: ‘Be a first-rate version of yourself, and not a second-rate version of another writer.’
We class schools into four grades: leading school, first-rate school, good school and school.
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
I think that, by comparison with $2,000 bottles of grand cru Burgundies, first-rate barolos, which sell for under $100, are undervalued ten-fold.
First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
More than anything else, a budget request is a statement of national priorities; a clear enumeration of what our country needs to grow its economy and remain in the future the first-rate power it is today.
I can’t name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I’m told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don’t print them in ‘The New York Times.’
It’s always fascinating – and sometimes a little disquieting – when two first-rate critics violently disagree.
I do believe that we’ve a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what’s happening in poetry in English. I’m interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I’m not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.
Guantanamo Bay is a first-rate detention facility that’s kept terrorists off the battlefield and kept America safe. It’s critical role in our national security cannot be overstated.
Every good war film, if you want to use that phrase – I don’t think it’s a good phrase, but if you want to use that phrase – every good film, a first-rate film about war, is an anti-war movie.
If you go to a second-rate place, and you are first-rate, it is very difficult to do first-rate work because you do not get that critical feedback you need for first-rate work on a daily basis.
As horrible as jail was, there were some first-rate guys in there.
Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler believes first-rate records are made by first-rate voices. He certainly has worked with enough of them: Clyde McPhatter, Joe Turner, La Vern Baker, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin.
