Quotes about Standards

Executives owe it to the organization and to their fellow workers not to tolerate nonperforming individuals in important jobs.

To compromise simply means that you go a tiny bit below what you know is right.

I get a feeling that American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be reckoned with

A rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity, or dishonesty of others.

The lesson in all this is that to pit women against men is a form of denigration of women, as though their measure must be determined by masculine standards.

Most blacks have lost the moral authority to claim the mantle of civil rights because they refuse to stand for what is right.

I didn't bother to ask him why he didn't wait for someone from the American Legation, for I knew the reason. French methods are a little old-fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the conscience, the sense of guilt, a criminal should be confronted with his crime, for he may break down and betray himself. I told myself again I was innocent

If there is no absolute by which to judge society, society is absolute.

Mundus vult decipi'—the world wants to be deceived. To live without deception presupposes standards beyond the reach of most people whose existence is largely shaped by compromise, evasion and mutual accommodation. Could they face their weakness, their vanity and selfishness, without a mask?

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.

People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for your to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was.