Quotes about average
page 2

“I welcome each new day with a hopeful expectancy that I, too, will rise above the ordinary. For I am not content to live a merely "normal" life or settle for an average existence. No, I am destined for more--much, much more.”

Melody Carlson (1956) American writer

Source: Finding Alice

Life, Hope

“He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

World, Way

“An average person with average talent, ambition and education can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Education, Personality

“… An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand…”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

“How could he find perfection in such an average day? Then I realized this was the whole point.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Perfection

“The average american spends six months of his or her life waiting for red lights to turn green. six months wasted, waiting for permission to move on.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Life, Light, Waiting

“The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a
new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be
released and channeled toward some great good.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

World, Waiting, Personality

“For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”

Nick Hornby Fever Pitch

Source: Fever Pitch

“I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

People

“The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Men

“… beds last on an average much longer than marriages…”

Michel Houellebecq book Whatever

Source: Whatever

Marriage

“If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven oris plainly superior to God….”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: In Defense Of Women

God

“Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.”

Stella Adler (1901–1992) American actress and teaching coach

Source: The Art of Acting

“By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

Source: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

See also the Wikipedia article on the Lake Wobegon effect.
A Prairie Home Companion, News from Lake Wobegon

Women, Men, Children, Strong

“As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson book Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Source: Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Night

“Average is very acceptable in our society but I don't think the angels are applauding. If you are determined to be excellent, to not back out of it, you will reap a harvest in your life.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Life, Angels, Thinking

“God didn't create you to be average. You were created to excel You have everything”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day

God

“You see yourself as very average, ordinary. And there is nothing ordinary about you, Rachel."
(Something Borrowed)”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

“An average person who develops the habit of setting clear priorities and getting important tasks completed quickly will run circles around a genius who talks a lot and makes wonderful plans but gets very little done.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Personality

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Attribution debunked in Langworth's Churchill by Himself. First known appearance is in a 1992 usenet post https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=rec.arts.comics.misc/EMj3ZowKq1U/E0dsEBwdZEgJ. Misattributed Source: Google books link https://books.google.com/books?id=vbsU21fEhLAC&q=average+voter#v=snippet&q=average%20voter&f=false

Democracy, Funny

“'Is that really the best you can say? An average-looking boy? An awful lot of boys are average-looking, S. Q.!' And poor S. Q., he just kept arguing that 'this boy was especially average-looking.' " ~ Kate Wetherall, The Mysterious Benedict Society”

Trenton Lee Stewart (1970) Novelist

Boy

“Addicts, as a group, generally score far above average o intelligence tests.
Why?
You tell me.
I guess maybe we're smart enough to have figured out how shitty things are and we decide addiction is the only way to deal with it.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

Way, Intelligence

“What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Thinking

“I am not plain, or average or - God forbid - vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge and a cherry on top.”

Wendy Mass book Every Soul a Star

Source: Every Soul a Star

God

“Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

Source: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

“The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting in above-average effort.”

Colin Powell (1937) Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general

1990s, My American Journey (1996)

People, Effort

“the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

“Be grateful you’re not in the forest in France
Where the average young person just hasn’t a chance
To escape from the perilous pants eating plants
But your pants are safe, you’re a fortunate guy
You ought to be shouting how lucky am I”

Dr. Seuss book Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

Source: Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?

Guy, Chance, Personality

“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

People, Thinking

“Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

“The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.”

Anatole France book The Revolt of the Angels

Variant: For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.
Source: The Revolt of the Angels (1914), Ch. XXI

Life

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, People, Age, Art

“The first thing the average white Latin American player does when he comes to the States is associate with other whites. He doesn't want to be seen with Latin Negroes, even from his own country, because he's afraid people might think he's colored.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in “Roberto Clementeː Pounder from Puerto Rico” by John Devaney, in Baseball Stars of 1964 (1964), edited by Ray Robinson, p. 150
Other, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1964</big>

People, Color, Thinking, Country

“Insurance companies nowadays apply the principle of so-called 'selection by insurance'; this means that they take into consideration the fact that persons who enter early into insurance contracts are on the average of a different type and have a different distribution of death ages from persons from persons admitted to the insurance at a more advanced age.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

First Lecture, The Definition of Probability, p. 18
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Death, Age, Personality

“When you are in the position privileged access, like a system administrator, you are exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee…”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Praxis films, 2013
2013

“Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

The Fallacy of Trusted Client Software, Schneier, Bruce, 2001-08, Cryptogram newsletter, 2018-08-12 https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2000/08/the_fallacy_of_trust.html, Digital Rights Management

“As many of us know, women are particularly focused on the household budget and the repeal of the carbon tax means a $550 a year benefit for the average family.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

After being asked by host Lisa Wilkinson to nominate his top achievement in his capacity as Minister for Women, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, "Tony Abbott names carbon tax repeal as his top achievement as Minister for Women'" http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-names-carbon-tax-repeal-as-his-top-achievement-as-minister-for-women-20141221-12bw42, December 22, 2014 2014

Women, Family

“Hall: This is all nonsense [and] you're getting all hot under the collar about nothing. It's the Great British patois. All great truths begin as blasphemies, so why castigate Rooney, young tender sweet bud-on-the-vine [Wayne] Rooney. Your average ten year old can instruct you in oral and anal sex.”

Stuart Hall (1929–2014) sociologist and cultural theorist

O'Connell and Rawling swiftly interrupt.
BBC Fighting Talk (2005)

Truth, Sex

“Well, you have to work out what it is. They are a little splinter. They can't summon many voters at any given time. They are a minority of a minority of a minority. They have everybody buffaloed because the great corporations like them and pay money to their candidates for sheriff and senator. And they're playing big-time politics. Yes, indeed. But the average person doesn't like them. You know, any time I want to get applause — and I lecture across America in state after state after state — when I fear things are getting a little low, I always say, “And another thing: Let us tax all the religions,” I bring down the goddamn house with that. And any politician would if he had sense enough to do it. The people don't like their tax exemption.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

On the religious right in America http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=342 2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

Money, People, Fear, Religion

““One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”
”For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.””

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 17 (p. 234)

People, Sadness, Law, Nature

“The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past. That is why it is not really possible to compare a writer like Howells with any living American writer because Howells thought that it was a good thing to know as much as possible about his own country as well as other countries while our writers today, in common with the presidents and paint manufacturers, live in a present without past among signs whose meanings are uninterpretable.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"William Dean Howells" (1983)
1980s, At Home (1988)

World, Education, Past, Painting

“Our complex society relies on proxy violence to the extent that many average people in the private sector can wander through life without really having to understand or think deeply about violence, because we are removed from it. We can afford to perceive it at a distant, abstract problem solved through high-minded strategy and social programming. When violence comes a knocking, we simply make a call, and the police come to "stop" the violence.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Violence is golden
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Life, People, Understanding, Problem

“Suppose it is desired to test the efficiency of several treatments intended to destroy certain larvae on a field. The experiments are arranged in the usual way. The treatments compared are applied to particular plots with several replications and then the plots (or smaller parts of them) are inspected and all the surviving larvae are counted. Thus the observations represent the numbers of surviving larvae in several equal areas. It happens frequently that, while there is room for doubt as to whether there is any significant difference between the average number of survivors corresponding to particular treatments, there is no doubt whatever that the variablitity of the observations differs from treatment to treatment.”

Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981) Polish statistician

p. 35 of "On a new class of "contagious" distributions, applicable in entomology and bacteriology." http://www.jstor.org/stable/2235986 The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 10, no. 1 (1939): 35–57.

Way, Parting

“It seems to me that we do live in two worlds. There is is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is a spiritual one, which to the average man, with his flashes of religious experience, if you like to call them that — that world is very often incoherent. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or… not all the time, occasionally, is a vital one and is what living is like.”

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

As quoted in "The Dreams of William Golding", BBC Arena (2012)

World, Time

“This is especially important when addressing less statistically savvy audiences. Such audiences could perhaps be encouraged to think of two normal distributions, one representing males and the other females. Instead of imagining that natural selection creates two distinct psychological types — a male type and a female type, described by the mean values for each group — they could be encouraged to imagine that natural selection pushes the male and female distributions closer together or further apart. This simple expedient may help people to visualize the effects of natural selection on average sex differences without at the same time losing sight of the variation within each sex.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 268

People, Sex, Imagination, Nature

“My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research." This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded–and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else–I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy.”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

Thinking

“Personally, though I am recognised all over the world as a teacher of meditation I have at the same time never relinquished my habit of prayer. I believe that the true occultist uses prayer and meditation interchangeably according to need and that both are equally important in the spiritual life. The trouble with prayer has been that the average human being makes it entirely a selfish thing and a means of acquisition of things for the separated self. True prayer asks nothing for the separated self but it will always be used by those who seek to help others.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter V - Part 1

Life, World, Teachers, Time

“The smaller the mammal, the more it is confined to smaller geographic areas. A small mammal is also more susceptible to subtle changes in climate and environment. …On average, the absence or presence of smaller species provides more precise clues to past conditions in an area than does the information gained from study of the bone assemblages of the larger animals.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Study, Change, Past, Animals

“Chicken-neck weakness is like a god now. And being totally passive, and being a huge jellyfish slacker who looks like a fried egg in a chair. That is the culture of this, okay? The worship of being destroyed. Literally, I've now discovered the secrets of it. … And everyone's wearing like pink and little green non-threatening, you know, colors, and this is what we face. This is what men look like now, on average. In fact, I used to bash men who were all into being big and muscular with tattoos and black on and going "raagh", now I get it! You don't wanna be like these people! Okay? I used to get mad at guys trying to act tough—no, no! That's good! Do that! In fact, I think I'm gonna just go all out with cut-off sleeves and drive a big fast car and be like "graagh", 'cause I mean I'm starting to get it! Men are running to that, because they see the armies… literally men in pastels… Now there's men everywhere wearing dresses, I'm telling you! It's like, they're just like "New World Order, slaughter me, please!"”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

And the New World Order is like "Act like a jellyfish coward and giggle at all reality", and they're like "Yes, yes!" "Alex Jones: I'm So Trendy Rant!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBA-sa97UYg March 2012. 2012

Men, God, People, Secret

“I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and that you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do things that no number of average people could do.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in Steve Jobs at 44, Time (Michael Krantz and Steve Jobs, Oct. 10, 1999) http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,32207,00.html 1990s

People

“6. You realize that if 10 million people saw the movie once, each wasting 3 hours of their lives, that 30 million hours have been wasted, and that if each person lived an average of 70 years, 3,424 years, or 49 lives will have been wasted watching the Titanic. James Cameron has effectively murdered 49 people. (Not necessarily a reason to cry, but it is to a sap that saw Titanic in the first place).”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

Reasons to cry during the movie "Titanic" http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=cry_titanic. The Best Page in the Universe

People, Personality, Cry

“When Ms Düsap heard that I was also about to embark on a literary career, Mrs. Düsap warned me that a crown of thorns rather than a crown of laurels awaited women on this road. In this world of ours it is not tolerated when a woman does well and claims a place for herself. In order to achieve this, it would be necessary for a woman to be far above average and she added: A man can be a merely average writer but a woman, never!”

Zabel Yesayan (1878–1943) Armenian writer

"Pagavan E : Zabel Yesayan'ın Barış Çağrısını Duyabilmek"] ["Enough! : Being Able to Hear Zabel Yesayan's Call for Peace"] by Melissa Bilal, in Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar [Feminist Approaches in Culture and Politics], Issue 7 (March 2009)

Women, World

“Normal is the wrong name often used for average.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p.135

“As yet the efficiency of selling goods has not been worked out. Most salesmen believe it cannot be done. They claim that there are too many variables in the problem. Perhaps there are, but nobody knows until the experiment has been thoroughly tried. In every case the victories of Efficiency have been won in spite of the most stubborn opposition from the men who were being helped. And one fact is sure - that the first Advertisers and Sales Managers who try out Efficiency and succeed will find themselves in a gold mine. They will have found a better way to enter a market that handles, in an average year, thirty thousand million dollars worth of goods.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Source: 1910s, Ads and Sales (1911), p. 7

Men, Way, Problem, Victory

“On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

People, Failure, Success

“What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows: American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U. S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

2000s, Europe's Anti-American Obsession (2003)

Money, Family, Reality, Reading

“The precepts “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you” … are born from the Gospel’s profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one’s own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else’s acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions—such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, “as the fruit from the tree.” … What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: “Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other”—but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 99-100

Love, Hate, Way, Nature

“She continued, 'Theirs was a religion of freedom and joy and not pervaded by fanatical and morbid asceticism as some people would have us believe.' Here again I feel she is absolutely right. The critics of Catharism fail to distinguish between the Parfait and the ordinary croyant. The latter were not required to fast and mortify the flesh any more than the average Hindu or Roman Catholic, even though both Hindu and Catholic priests may regularly practise asceticism as well as meditation and other such disciplines.”

Arthur Guirdham (1905–1992) British physician, psychiatrist and writer

Source: The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), p. 100

People, Religion, Feeling, Freedom

“… we have a situation in which millions of vehicles, each a miracle of often unnecssary complication, are hurtling in all directions under the impulse of anything up to 200 horsepower. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys — yet often carry a single passenger. They can travel at a hundred miles an hour, but are lucky if they average forty. In one lifetime they have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Source: 1970s, Chapter 3 (The Future of Transport) in Profiles of the Future (7th printing, 1972)

War, Travel, History, Support

“All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it.”

Paolo Bacigalupi book The Windup Girl

Source: The Windup Girl (2009), p. 121

Life, Question, Personality

“Countries that do not control knowledge and information tend to do better because the average guy who is exposed to a lot of information can get ideas and profit from them.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

Guy, Idea, Knowledge, Country

“If we do not cut emissions, we face even more devastating consequences, as unchecked they could raise global average temperature to 4C or more above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The shift to such a world could cause mass migrations of hundreds of millions of people away from the worst-affected areas. That would lead to conflict and war, not peace and prosperity. … We also underestimated the potential importance of strong feedbacks, such as the thawing of the permafrost to release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as well as tipping points beyond which some changes in the climate may become effectively irreversible.”

Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford (1946) British economist and academic

"Flooding and storms in UK are clear signs of climate change, says Lord Stern. Author of 2006 report says recent weather is part of international pattern and demonstrates urgent need to cut carbon emissions" http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/13/flooding-storms-uk-climate-change-lord-stern?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2, The Guardian (13 February 2014).

War, People, World, Peace

“Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code is fast and clever and tight. You won.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

How Software Companies Die

Soul, Game, Spring, Lying

“The firm achieving focus may also potentially earn above-average returns for its industry. Its focus means that the firm either has a low cost position with its strategic target, high differentiation, or both.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

Source: Competitive strategy, 1980, p. 39

“Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

April Thesis (1917)

Time

“There is plenty of room at the top because very few people care to travel beyond the average route. And so most of us seem satisfied to remain within the confines of mediocrity.”

Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) First President of Nigeria

My Odyssey (1971), No. 5

People, Travel

“That was the best break of my life, hooking up with the Warners. They don't go much for the "pretty boy" type there. An average-looking guy like me has a chance to get someplace, to portray people the way they really are, without any frills.”

Dane Clark (1912–1998) American film actor

New York Times, Dane Clark, Actor, 85, Dies; Starred in World War II Films, September 16, 1998

Life, People, Way, Guy

“I don't rack my brains much over the subject of good and evil, but, on average, I haven't discovered much 'good' in men. Based on what I know of them, they are for the most part nothing but scoundrels.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Correspondance avec le pasteur Pfister, 1909-1939, Gallimard, 1991, p.103; as quoted in Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World by Matthieu Ricard
Attributed from posthumous publications

Men, Evil, Parting

“Ordinarily the enjoyment of sensual pleasures is the highest and only happiness of the average man. There is no doubt a kind of momentary happiness in the anticipation, gratification and retrospection of such fleeting material pleasures, but they are illusive and temporary. According to the Buddha non-attachment is a greater bliss.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Happiness, Pleasure

“When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines.”

Benjamin Page (1939) Professor of Decision Making

Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 19

Money, Democracy, Suffering, Wealth

“This led me to extend my inquiry into the origin of all religions, and this again led to an enquiry into the origin of nations and languages; and ultimately I came to a resolution to devote six hours a day to this pursuit for ten years. Instead of six hours daily for ten years, I believe I have, upon the average, applied myself to it for nearly ten hours daily for almost twenty years. In the first ten years of my search I may fairly say, I found nothing which I sought for; in the latter part of the twenty, the quantity of matter has so crowded in upon me, that I scarcely know how to dispose of it.”

Godfrey Higgins (1772–1833) British archaeologist

Undated letter at Godfrey Higgins http://burghwallis.com/village/articles/higgins.htm biography.

Religion, Search, Parting

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

2010s, 2018, Interview with Bill Kristol (2018)

History, Understanding

“Everyone who achieves strives for totality, and the value of his achievement lies in that totality—that is, in the fact that the whole, undivided nature of a human being should be expressed in his achievement. But when determined by our society, as we see it today, achievement does not express a totality; it is completely fragmented and derivative. It is not uncommon for the community to be the site where a joint and covert struggle is waged against higher ambitions and more personal goals. … The socially relevant achievement of the average person serves in the vast majority of cases to repress the original and nonderivative, inner aspirations of the human being.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

The Life of Students (1915)

Communication, Nature, Personality

“Experienced well-being is on average unaffected by marriage, not because marriage makes no difference to happiness, but because it changes some aspects of life for the better and others for the worse.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Chapter 38, "Thinking about life", pages 400-401 (ISBN 9780141033570).

Life, Marriage, Happiness, Change

“The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm."”

Constant Lambert (1905–1951) British composer and conductor

Opera magazine, December 1950.

“Alex is cool because a lot of people can relate to her. She's not the most popular girl in school, but she's also not a geek. I know what it's like to think you don't always fit in, and I think kids can relate to Alex's feelings about being average.”

Larisa Oleynik (1981) actress

On her character from the TV series The Secret World of Alex Mack; USA Today, August 7, 1995.

People, School, Feeling, Girl

“The IPCC WG1 Chapter 3 Report clearly cherrypicked information on the robustness of the land near-surface air temperature to bolster their advocacy of a particular perspective on the role of humans within the climate system. As a result, policymakers and the public have been given a false (or at best an incomplete) assessment of the multi-decadal global average near-surface air temperature trends.”

Roger A. Pielke (1946) American meteorologist

"Documentation of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley - Part I," Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog (2007-06-20) http://climatesci.org/2007/06/20/documentation-of-ipcc-wg1-bias-by-roger-a-pielke-sr-and-dallas-staley-part-i/

Falseness

“I set off in yoga seventy years ago when ridicule, rejection, and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India. Indeed If I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect. At one time I was asked to become a sannyasin and renounce the world, but I declined. I wanted to live as an ordinary householder with all the trials and tribulations of life and to take my yoga practice r to average people who share my life with me the common life of work, marriage and children. I was blessed with all three…”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

Life, Marriage, Children, People

“Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let the bells ring, let the bells ring! Play music now: play us a tune on an unbroken spinet. Do not make echoes of forgotten time, do not strike music from old broken keys, do not make ghosts with faded tinklings on the yellowed board; but play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, play lively music when the instrument was new, let us see Mozart playing in the parlor, and let us hear the sound of the ladies' voices. But more than that; waken the turmoil of forgotten streets, let us hear their sounds again unmuted, and unchanged by time, throw the light of Wednesday morning on the Third Crusade, and let us see Athens on an average day.”

Thomas Wolfe book Of Time and the River

Of Time and the River (1935)

Music, Light, Time

“I was just an enthusiastic mountaineer of modest abilities who was willing to work quite hard and had the necessary imagination and determination. I was just an average bloke; it was the media that transformed me into a heroic figure. And try as I did, there was no way to destroy my heroic image. But as I learned through the years, as long as you didn’t believe all that rubbish about yourself, you wouldn’t come to much harm.”

Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) New Zealand mountaineer

Sir Edmund Hillary : King Of The World

Way, Imagination, Mountain, Learning

“In an experiment in Illinois, members of a randomly selected group of unemployed individuals were offered a bonus of $500 if they found a job within 11 weeks and kept that job for four months. On average, people who were offered the bonus received UI for one week less than the control group, and the program saved more on UI benefits than it spent on bonuses.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 9, Social Insurance I: Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, p. 197

People

“Standing outside a factory farm, the first question that comes to mind is not a moral but a practical one: Where is everybody? Where are the owners, the farmers, the livestock managers, the extra hands, anybody? I have been driving around the North Carolina countryside on a Thursday afternoon in January 2001, pulling in at random to six hog farms, and have yet to find a single farmer or any other living soul. … There are so many factory farms around here that they are easy to miss. I doubt that the average visitor just passing through even knows what they are …”

Matthew Scully (1959) American political writer and speechwriter

Dominion (2002)

Soul, Question

“There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i. e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Sense, Change, Time, Weather

“Williams is one batter I thought would break my lifetime batting average of.367. If he'd learned to hit to left, Ted would have broken every record in the book.”

Ty Cobb (1886–1961) American baseball player

On Ted Williams, as quoted in "Here's the Pitch" by Frank Finch, in The Los Angeles Times (June 5, 1958), p. C2

Books, Learning

“The average Briton, as well as honorable and right honorable members of the House, had known that England possessed colonies and had understood that colonies, as a matter of course, existed to supply him with sugar and rice, indigo and tobacco, and in return to buy at a good price whatever he might himself wish to sell.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Housing

“The result of a job element analysis is a weighted list of characteristics that managers perceive as important in distinguishing superior from average performers, and those characteristics required by anyone in the job.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 41.

“Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.”

Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) English novelist

The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ed. Newman Flower (pub. Cassell, 1932)

Reading, Personality

“In order to have any hope of obtaining the initiative of his workmen the manager must give some special incentive to his men beyond that which is given to the average of the trade. This incentive can be given in several different ways, as, for example, the hope of rapid promotion or advancement; higher wages, either in the form of generous piecework prices or of a premium or bonus of some kind for good and rapid work; shorter hours of labor; better surroundings and working conditions than are ordinarily given, etc., and, above all, this special incentive should be accompanied by that personal consideration for, and friendly contact with, his workmen which comes only from a genuine and kindly interest in the welfare of those under him.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, p. 87.

Men, Hope, Way, Personality

“Keep in mind that the practice of dream interpretation is not generally useful for spiritual advancement. […] People codify things and events as positive or negative based on culture. Even within a culture there can be variations of codification. Thus, dream analysis by the average person often can lead to confusion due to personal speculation and mental gymnastics.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 25

People, Dreams, Personality

“To the average mathematician who merely wants to know that his work is securely based, the most appealing choice is to avoid difficulties by means of Hilbert's program. Here one regards mathematics as a formal game and one is only concerned with the question of consistency.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

p. 11 of "Comments on the foundations of set theory." https://books.google.com/books?id=TVi2AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA11 In Axiomatic set theory, pp. 9-15. Providence (RI). American Mathematical Society, 1971.

Game, Mathematics, Question

“Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 56)

Personality

“Hold somebody's hand and feel its warmth. Gram per gram, it converts 10 000 times more energy per second that the sun. You find this hard to believe? Here are the numbers: an average human weighs 70 kilograms and consumes about 12 600 kilojoules / day; that makes about 2 millijoules / gram. second, or 2 milliwatts / gram. For the sun it's a miserable 0.2 microjoules / gram. second. Some bacteria, such as the soil bacterium "Azotobacter" convert as much as 10 joules / gram. second, outperforming the sun by a factor 50 million. I am warm because inside each of my body cells there are dozens, hundreds or even thousands of mitochondria that burn the food I eat.”

Gottfried Schatz (1936–2015) biochemist

Jeff's view on science and scientists (Amsterdam, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, ISBN 0-444-52133-X, pbk.), Ch. 5: "The tragic matter" (p. 43).

Food, Feeling, Time, Sun