Quotes about grade
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Roberto Clemente photo

“I don't want to be a big shot. From head to toes, Roberto Clemente is good as Richard Nixon. I believe that. And I think that every man should believe that about himself. I am not dumb. I went to school. I made grades. But when I came here, I couldn't speak English. All I could say was, 'Me, Roberto Clemente.' Some of them laugh and say it sounded like, 'Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As paraphrased and quoted in "Roberto Clemente, The Pirates' Thorobred: He proved his class in the Series" by Joe Heiling, in The Houston Post, circa Fall 1971; reprinted in Baseball Digest (January 1972)
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>
Context: He is a proud man. Proud of Puerto Rico, his native land, and proud to be a professional baseball player. He is a strong believer in the dignity of man and that all people, no matter their color, should work together. "I don't want to be a big shot. From head to toes, Roberto Clemente is good as Richard Nixon. I believe that. And I think that every man should believe that about himself. I am not dumb. I went to school. I made grades. But when I came here, I couldn't speak English. All I could say was, 'Me, Roberto Clemente.' Some of them laugh and say it sounded like, 'Me Tarzan, you Jane.'" He is a self-made man. He took his natural talents and made the most of them, in baseball and in his personal life. He's never abused them. "Some players are wild on the field and off the field. They are made to look like heroes. I get nothing but sarcasm. And people take me for a fool."

Charles Lyell photo

“The new race or species may not be absolutely superior in the sum of its powers and endowment to the parent stock, and may even be more simple in structure and of a lower grade of intelligence, as well as of organisation, provided, on the whole, it happens to have some slight advantage over its rivals. Progression, therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 411-412
Context: The competition of races and species, observes Mr. Darwin, is always most severe between those which are most closely allied and which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature. Hence, when the conditions of existence are modified, the original stock runs great risk of being superseded by some one of its modified offshoots. The new race or species may not be absolutely superior in the sum of its powers and endowment to the parent stock, and may even be more simple in structure and of a lower grade of intelligence, as well as of organisation, provided, on the whole, it happens to have some slight advantage over its rivals. Progression, therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection, though, when a higher organisation happens to be coincident with superior fitness to new conditions, the new species will have greater power and a greater chance of permanently maintaining and extending its ground.

“The elimination of conventional tests… is necessary because, as soon as they are used as judgement-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: The elimination of conventional tests... is necessary because, as soon as they are used as judgement-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests. … "Courses" turn out to be contingent upon testing. A "course" generally consists of a series of briefings for the great Trivia contest. It's a kind of rigid quiz show. And it seems to work only if the contestants value the "prize." The prize, of course, is a "grade." An appropriate grade entitles the participant to continue playing the Trivia game. All the while, let's not forget, very little, if any, substantive intellectual activity is going on.

“The five-hundred-bushelers… were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. …Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

John F. Kennedy photo
Nikolai Bukharin photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Peter Kropotkin photo
Immanuel Kant photo
Charles Darwin photo

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibilites.”

On the Origin of Species (1859)

Leopold Kronecker photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo

“Universal History exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of Freedom. The analysis of the successive grades, in their abstract form, belongs to Logic; in their concrete aspect to the Philosophy of Spirit.”

Here it is sufficient to state that the first step in the process presents that immersion of Spirit in Nature which has been already referred to ; the second shows it as advancing to the consciousness of its freedom. But this initial separation from Nature is imperfect and partial, since it is derived immediately from the merely natural state, is consequently related to it, and is still encumbered with it as an essentially connected element. The third step is the elevation of the soul from this still limited and special form of freedom to its pure universal form ; that state in which the spiritual essence attains the consciousness and feeling of itself. These grades are the ground-principles of the general process; but how each of them on the other hand involves within itself a process of formation, constituting the links in a dialectic of transition, to particularise this must be preserved for the sequel. Here we have only to indicate that Spirit begins with a germ of infinite possibility, but only possibility, containing its substantial existence in an undeveloped form, as the object and goal which it reaches only in its resultant full reality. In actual existence Progress appears as an advancing from the imperfect to the more perfect; but the former must not be understood abstractly as only the imperfect, but as something which involves the very opposite of itself the so-called perfect as a germ or impulse. So reflectively, at least possibility points to something destined to become actual; the Aristotelian δύναμιςis https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B4%CF%8D%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%BC%CE%B9%CF%82 also potentia, power and might. Thus the Imperfect, as involving its opposite, is a contradiction, which certainly exists, but which is continually annulled and solved; the instinctive movement the inherent impulse in the life of the soul to break through the rind of mere nature, sensuousness, and that which is alien to it, and to attain to the light of consciousness, i. e. to itself.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 58-59 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Edward Bellamy photo
Anthony Fauci photo

“This is material that is quite formidable, that is infecting people with inhalation anthrax, infecting them in the absence of direct contact. You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent.”

Anthony Fauci (1940) American immunologist and head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Response to a 2001 anthrax attack, reported in Denise Grady, "Not his first epidemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci sticks to the facts", The New York Times (March 15, 2020).

Greta Thunberg photo

“Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for the climate.”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

Her twitter bio
2020, Rolling Stone Interview: How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement, Jack Davison, (March 2020)
Source: [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-cover-965949/

Newt Gingrich photo
Trevor Noah photo

“So—I’m a major. New pay grade.”

Charles E. Gannon (1960) American novelist

She laughed. “My salary has just jumped from nothing to next-to-nothing. What will I spend it all on?”
Source: Fire with Fire (2013), Chapter 33 (p. 378)

Prevale photo

“Roles are temporary, grades and titles have an expiry, but the way you treat people will be remembered forever.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: I ruoli sono temporanei, gradi e titoli hanno una scadenza, ma il modo in cui tratti le persone verrà ricordato per sempre.
Source: prevale.net