Ty Cobb - J L Montrose - Licence to Kill 1989 - Red Adair - Ogden Nash - Jahangir Khan - John Updike - Samuel Butler - Kazuo Ishiguro - Laurence Sterne -
The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money and that’s it, not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it. Ty Cobb
Experts may blind themselves by expertise, The courts should protect the citizen against risks which professional men and others may ignore. J L Montrose, Is Negligence an Ethical or a Sociological Concept? 1958
Leave it to the professionals. Licence to Kill 1989 starring Timothy Dalton & Benicio del Toro & Carey Lowell & Robert Davi & Talisa Soto & Anthony Zerbe & Everett McGill & Desmond Llewelyn & Robert Brown & Caroline Bliss & Don Shroud et al, director John Glen, Bond to bird
If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. Red Adair
Professional men, they have no cares;
Whatever happens, they get theirs. Ogden Nash, I Yield to My Learned Brother, 1935
Without hard work and discipline it is difficult to be a top professional. Jahangir Khan
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring – an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. John Updike
Professions are all very well for those who have connection and interest as well as capital, but otherwise they are white elephants. How many men do not you and I know who have talent, assiduity, excellent good sense, straightforwardness, every quality in fact which should command success, and who yet go on from year to year waiting and hoping against hope for the work which never comes? How, indeed, is it likely to come unless to those who either are born with interest, or who marry in order to get it? Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
‘What is more, sir,’ his lordship went on, ‘I believe I have a good idea of what you mean by “professionalism”. It appears to mean getting one’s way by cheating and manipulating. It means ordering one’s priorities according to greed and advantage rather than the desire to see goodness and justice prevail in the world. If that is the “professionalism” you refer to, sir, I don’t much care for it and have no wish to acquire it.’ Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day p103
Human nature is the same in all professions. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen