The most insidious influence on the young is not violence, drugs, tobacco, drink or sexual perversion, but our pursuit of the trivial and our tolerance of the third rate.
The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos
There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!
Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.
When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.
The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.
