Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

This above all makes history useful and desirable; it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.

Modi has always been very particular about law and order. He believes in fairness and justice, and encouraged us to simply work as per law without fear or favour. His ability to think big and implement it on the ground is exemplary. He had a vision of a bank account for every household.

I have great respect for the LDS church - their commitment to family and taking care of each other is exemplary. I just don't believe the tenets of the faith that they believe.

Jackie Robinson, as an athlete and as someone who was trying to make a stand for equality, he was exemplary.

I employ case studies of failure into my courses, emphasizing that they teach us much more than studies of success. It is not that success stories cannot serve as models of good design or as exemplars of creative engineering. They can do that, but they cannot teach us how close to failure they are.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers...of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good...They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found...This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all other communities.

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Before you I engage myself to serve my country with the devotion and the exemplary that this post demands. I understand responsibilities of the job and as such I give a republican salute to Nicolas Sarkozy who has led France for 5 years and who deserves all of our respect.

When the entertainers of the Right aren't declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates they're pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug an exemplar of what they call 'the Chicago way.'

Jackie Robinson as an athlete and as someone who was trying to make a stand for equality he was exemplary.