We who have received the truth of the everlasting gospel ought not to be satisfied with anything short of the best, and the best is the fulness of the Father's kingdom; and for that I hope and pray we shall live and set examples in righteousness to all men that none may stumble, that none may falter, that none may turn from the path of righteousness, due to anything that we may do or say, and I ask it in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

It’s knowing what to ignore that makes us successful, not how many volumes of data we can consume at the same time. Ask any successful athlete, performer, or writer about how they consistently perform at high levels and they’ll tell you about focus, and the discipline of centering their attention on what they’re doing. They practice and drill so that basic tasks become so familiar that they don’t have to think about them anymore, focusing instead on the details most of us miss.

I'm willing to be held to the highest possible standard...

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence — moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how ‘democracy’ (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’ Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s [of the same age] attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when ‘I’m as good as you’ has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers — or should I say nurses? — will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.

...I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do stuff that no number of average people could do...small and medium-sized teams of these people could accomplish extraordinary things and run circles around large teams of normal people.

Mediocrity always attacks excellence.

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.