Yquotes.com

 

First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.
--
As quoted in Comic Sections (Dublin 1993) by D MacHale

 

Andre Weil

» Andre Weil - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity.

 

Paul Halmos

 

I knew I'd never be more than a second-rate business man and a second-rate writer — so I decided to add the two things together and be a first rate advertising man.

 

Bruce Fairchild Barton

 

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

 

Willa Cather

 

Reports to the Surgeon General... represent the final word upon the efficient and devoted sense of responsibility of our people in this obligation to our fellow citizens. Overwhelmingly they confirm the fact that the general mortality rate, infant mortality rate, epidemics, the disease rate—are less than in normal times. There is but one explanation. That is, that through an aroused sense of public responsibility, those in destitution and their children are receiving actually more adequate care than even in normal times.

 

Herbert Hoover

 

In most Western economies, the general relationship is not in fact between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment, but between the rate of change of inflation and the rate of change of unemployment.

 

Paul Ormerod