Selected quality quotes

1. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

2. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

3. There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

4. Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

5. Good service can save a bad meal, but there is no level of food that can save bad service.

6. I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

7. My idea of a good picture is one that's in focus and of a famous person.

8. There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

9. A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

10. Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

11. If I give you a good wine, you will see how it tastes and after you ask where it comes from.

12. I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.

13. Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

14. The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

15. The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

16. As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

17. The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

18. I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.

19. How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!

20. We cannot make good news out of bad practice.

21. Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

22. If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.

23. If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.

24. If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

25. Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

26. Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

27. Less is only more where more is no good.

28. Respect the masterpiece. It is true reverence to man. There is no quality so great, none so much needed now.

29. Ther nis no werkman, whatsoevere he be, That may bothe werke wel and hastily.

30. The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

31. Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.

32. It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.

33. When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.

34. The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

35. Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

36. A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

37. Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.

38. There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

39. There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light, And every kind of love makes a glory in the night. There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest, But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.

40. Good people drink good beer.

41. Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

42. Good things, when short, are twice as good.

43. Disneyland is not just another amusement park. It's unique, and I want it kept that way. Besides, you don't work for a dollar - you work to create and have fun.

44. I'm doing this because I want to do it better.

45. Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

46. The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

47. He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.

48. I never saw so many shocking bad hats in my life.

49. True happiness Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth and choice.

50. The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.

51. '... there are now unmistakeable signs of a trend in favor of superior products at premium prices. The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife.'

52. 'The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.'

53. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.

54. There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

55. Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst.

56. Votes should be weighed not counted.

57. A master-piece ... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

58. Any one detail, followed through to its source, will usually reveal the general state of readiness of the whole organization.

59. Everybody keeps calling for Excellence - excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: 'Elitism!' And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. 'Standing out' is undemocratic.

60. Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.

61. There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey.

62. Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.

63. Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful - our own innocence.

64. If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, - if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, - we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set police at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.

65. I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

66. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.

67. Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.

68. It is as bad as bad can be: it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-drest.

69. Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

70. 'Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.'

71. 'Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the alternatives within itself, and so masters them.'

72. 'Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.'

73. The difference between the first- and second-best things in art absolutely seems to escape verbal definition - it is a matter of a hair, a shade, an inward quiver of some kind - yet what miles away in the point of preciousness!

74. This was such bad writing that it was good.

75. All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

76. Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.

77. Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.

78. Bread that must be sliced with an ax is bread that is too nourishing.

79. A vital difference between the professional man and a man of business is that money making to the professional man should, by virtue of his assumption, be incidental; to the business man it is primary. Money has its limitations; while it may buy quantity, there is something beyond it and that is quality.

80. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.

81. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of the whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of large work.

82. What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. (p. 79)

83. For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.

84. When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, 'But why do you want to build an amusement park? They're so dirty.' I told her that was just the point - mine wouldn't be.

85. When we consider a project, we really study it - not just the surface idea, but everything about it. And when we go into that new project, we believe in it all the way. We have confidence in our ability to do it right. And we work hard to do the best possible job.

86. That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

87. Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

88. Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

89. When asked 'How do you know a restaurant has good chili?' McGuire's answer, 'If the waitress has dirty ankles, the chili is good.'

90. I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language.

91. If you are going to do something, do it well. And leave something witchy.

92. There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

93. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

94. Affected dispatch is one of the most dangerous things to business that can be. It is like that, which the physicians call predigestion, or hasty digestion; which is sure to fill the body full of crudities, and secret seeds of diseases. Therefore measure not dispatch, by the times of sitting, but by the advancement of the business.

95. That's the thing about people who think they hate computers ... What they really hate are lousy programmers.

96. [about starring in 'Jaws: The Revenge'] I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

97. If it isn't a wonderful story first, who cares how 'important' it is? (Ibid.)

98. Everybody thinks that Disneyland is a gold mine - but we have had our problems. You've got to work it and know how to handle it. Even trying to keep the park clean is a tremendous expense. And those sharp-pencil guys tell you, 'Walt, if we cut down on maintenance, we'd save a lot of money.' But I don't believe in that - it's like any other show on the road; it must be kept clean and fresh.

99. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.

100. Next to excellence, comes the appreciation of it.