Lowest Quotes - Page 20

• As damaging as the obsessive emphasis on testing often proves to be for kids in general, I believe that the effects are still more harmful in those schools in which the resources available to help the children learn the skills that will be measured by these tests are fewest, the scores they get are predictably the lowest, and the strategies resorted to by principals in order to escape the odium attaching to a disappointing set of numbers tend to be the most severe.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Believe, Kids

  Jonathan Kozol (2005). “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America”, p.110, Broadway Books

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• How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many
  proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many
  magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the
  Christians; so many sages philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their
  deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their
  own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then
  ever before from applause.

  Tertullian

  Christian, Expression, Flames

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• Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.

  William Hazlitt

  Real, Humility, Modesty

  William Hazlitt (1848). “The Miscellaneous Works”, p.108

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• What we call the highest and the lowest in nature are both equally perfect. A willow bush is as beautiful as the human form divine.

  Beatrix Potter

  Beautiful, Perfect, Divine

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• There's a victory and defeat-the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats-which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

  Plato

  Character, Responsibility, Men

  Plato (2008). “Laws”, p.11, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition.

  Peter Thiel

  Medicine, Focus, Fruit

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• The highest virtue does nothing. Yet, nothing needs to be done. The lowest virtue does everything. Yet, much remains to be done.

  Laozi

  Taoism, Doe, Needs

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• The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.

  Milton Friedman

  Business, Loss, Community

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• Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator.

  Nick Hornby

  Football, Radio, Common

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• I'm sure it's not any wish of mine that I'm born with inclinations for better things. If I could be born again, and had the designing of myself, I'd be born the lowest and coarsest-minded person imaginable, so that I could find plenty of companionship, or I'd be born an idiot, which would be better still.

  Miles Franklin

  Design, Wish, Would Be

  Miles Franklin (2009). “My Brilliant Career”, p.61, The Floating Press

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• Speaking biologically, fruit in a slightly shriveled state is holding its respiration and energy consumption down to the lowest possible level. It is like a person in meditation: his metabolism, respiration, and calorie consumption reach an extremely low level. Even if he fasts, the energy within the body will be conserved. In the same way, when mandarin oranges grow wrinkled, when fruit shrivels, when vegetables wilt, they are in the state that will preserve their food value for the longest possible time.

  Masanobu Fukuoka

  Vegetables, Orange, Meditation

  Masanobu Fukuoka (2010). “The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming”, p.88, New York Review of Books

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• The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others.

  Robert Owen

  Humanity, Wages, Individual

  Robert Owen (1841). “A development of the principles and plans on which to establish self-supporting home colonies: as a most secure and profitable investment for capital, and an effectual means permanently to remove the causes of ignorance, poverty, and crime”, p.7

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• When you exercise your freedom to express yourself at the lowest level, you ultimately condemn yourself to live at that level.

  Zig Ziglar

  Inspirational, Character, Exercise

  Zig Ziglar (1997). “Over the Top: Moving from Survival to Stability, from Stability to Success, from Success to Significance”, p.258, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.

  Hyman Rickover

  Ambition, Limits, Common

  Hyman Rickover's address to US Naval Postgraduate School, March 16, 1954.

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• The animated books pay the lowest rates at the Big Two and you can forget about royalties.

  Mark Millar

  Book, Two, Pay

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• The highest virtue is not virtuous. Therefore it has virtue. The lowest virtue holds on to virtue. Therefore it has no virtue.

  Laozi

  Taoism, Virtue, Virtuous

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• I think that, regardless of our culture, age, or even personal handicaps, we can still strive for something exceptional. Why not expand our sights instead of restricting our lives and accepting the lowest common denominator of a dormant existence? Faith. . . will permit us to take a chance on a new path, perhaps different from the one we now follow. It may be surprising where it leads.

  Jimmy Carter

  Faith, Thinking, Sight

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• Reduced to its lowest terms, the great struggle which now rocks the whole earth more and more takes on the character of a struggle of the individual versus the state.

  J. Reuben Clark

  Struggle, Character, Rocks

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• The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Psychology, Levels, Come Up

  Henry David Thoreau, Odell Shepard (1961). “The Heart of Thoreau's Journals”, p.4, Courier Corporation

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• The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

  Carl Sagan

  Ignorance, Media, Sound

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.49, Ballantine Books

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• Take the lowest place, and you shall reach the highest.

  Milarepa

  Highest

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• I'm never at my worst because even at my lowest, its a learning experience. It's something that I'll bounce ideas off. I can take negatives and flip them to positives at all times.

  Kanye West

  Ideas, Flip, Worst

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• What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Eye, Heart, People

  Letter to Theo, from The Hague, July 21, 1882.

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• Good grief. If we can’t laugh at ourselves, and at one another, in good spirit and without malice, then what fun can be left? If we must withhold all ribbing in the name of protecting everyone’s feelings, then we truly are a toothless society. We will reach what I call “the lowest common denominator of butthurt.

  George Takei

  Fun, Grief, Names

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• My politics are: I'm a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I'm pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It's good for everybody, it's not red or blue.

  Travis Kalanick

  Blue, Want, Red

  "Travis Kalanick: The Transportation Trustbuster" by Andy Kessler, www.wsj.com. January 25, 2013.

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