There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
Paul Gauguin

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority.
Orison Swett Marden

There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
Vladimir Nabokov

There's a lot of mediocrity being celebrated, and a lot of wonderful stuff being ignored or discouraged.
Sean Penn

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.
Rutherford B. Hayes

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
Charles Lamb

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

We shouldn't accept mediocrity as the best a politician can do.
Joe Manchin

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.
Napoleon Bonaparte