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Success and failure

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“Insurrection, n. An unsuccessful revolution. Disaffection's failure to substitute misrule for bad government.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) said by 1914 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.”
Winston Churchill (1874–1965) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech (May 28, 1948) at the Scottish Unionist Conference, Perth, Scotland, in Never Give In! : The best of Winston Churchill's Speeches (2003), Hyperion, p. 446
“Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs—the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest—you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.”
Mark Twain (1835–1910) said by 1910 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.”
James A. Michener (1907–1997) said by 1997 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) said by 1956 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me, because of the image they've made of me — and that I've made of myself — as a sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's and I can't live up to it.”
Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement c. 1962, as quoted in Marilyn (1992) by Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham, Ch. 30
“Well, I don't want to be a soldier mama, I don't want to dieWell, I don't want to be a sailor mama, I don't want to flyWell, I don't want to be a failure mama, I don't want to cryWell, I don't want to be a soldier mama, I don't want to die”
John Lennon (1940–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) said by 1919 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You could no more make an agreement with them than you could nail currant jelly to a wall - and the failure to nail current jelly to a wall is not due to the nail; it is due to the currant jelly.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to William Roscoe Thayer (2 July 1915)
“If the American people are not fit for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants and not the masters of those whom they themselves put in office, then Lincoln's work was wasted and the whole system of government upon which this great democratic republic rests is a failure.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) said by 1919 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) said by 1983 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister.”
W. H. Auden (1907–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I much prefer other people solving my problems for me. So me having to come up with a project is actually a failure of the world—and the world just hasn’t failed in the last 20 years for me.”
Linus Torvalds (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use that strength.”
Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In these and other ways, let us move up the steep and difficult path toward comprehensive disarmament, securing mutual confidence through mutual verification, and building the institutions of peace as we dismantle the engines of war. We must not let failure to agree on all points delay agreements where agreement is possible. And we must not put forward proposals for propaganda purposes.”
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fools! who fancy Christ mistaken; Man a tool to buy and sell; Earth a failure, God-forsaken, Anteroom of Hell.”
Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) said by 1875 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To call someone “anti-American”, indeed to be anti-American, (or for that matter, anti-Indian or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those the establishment has set out for you... If you don't love us, you hate us... If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.”
Arundhati Roy (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny.”
Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nobel Prize Lecture (8 December 1987)
“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”
John Keats (1795–1821) said by 1821 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Failure on the other hand is infectious. The world is full of charming failures (for all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others) and unless the writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.”
Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) said by 1974 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible. But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action.”
Bill Clinton (born 1946) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Televised address on August 17, 1998 CNN transcript
“However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.”
Emil Cioran (1911–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”
William Faulkner (1897–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it ...”
Charles Lamb (1775–1834) said by 1834 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.”
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) said by 1915 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What other people label or might try to call failure, I have learned is just God's way of pointing you in a new direction.”
Oprah Winfrey (born 1954) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Oprah's commencement speech at Howard University (May 12, 2007)
“[Winfrey attributes this aphorism to Jeff Weiner, founder of Linkedin] Failure is what’s going to humble you.”
Oprah Winfrey (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me, failure is not fatal unless you quit; getting knocked down is not embarrassing unless you allow it to keep you down.”
John Ashcroft (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.”
Groucho Marx (1890–1977) first seen 1665 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From his book Groucho and Me. It is a variation of a maxim by 17th-century French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld: "In the adversity of our best friends, we often find something that is not displeasing." (Maxim 99…
“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
Neal Stephenson (born 1959) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, Fall 2011
“There will be recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, at severe and possibly horrendous cost, particularly for the poor and more vulnerable. But there will be no recovery from the melting of the polar ice sheets and the other devastating consequences of global warming. Here, too, the catastrophe results from a market failure — in this case, of truly earth-shaking proportions.”
Noam Chomsky (born 1928) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.”
Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does a populace have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? History already has answered that question. Every society in the ConSentiency today reflects the historical judgment that failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.”
Frank Herbert (1920–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For more than three decades the Americans had been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence.”
Alan Watts (1915–1973) said by 1973 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He (the Professor) was a failure but did his best to hide it. One of his failings was that he could barely write, except in a twelfth century hand, in Latin, with abbreviations.”
T. H. White (1906–1964) said by 1964 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.”
Emma Goldman (1869–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must tell you that in this moment all doubt as to my attested worth went out of me, who had redeemed a kingdom, and begotten a king, and created a god. So you waste time, my friend, in trying to convince me of all human life's failure and unimportance, for I am not in sympathy with this modern morbid pessimistic way of talking. It has a very ill sound, and nothing whatever is to be gained by it.”
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) said by 1958 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[There has been a] collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
“[There had been a] collective failure of government, and a collapse of will by the British establishment, to deliver on the mandate of the people”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Boris Johnson sets out his 'Super Canada' Brexit plan, BBC News, 28 September 2018
“I've looked carefully at no deal, I've assessed its consequences, both for our country and yours, and yes, of course, we could do it, the UK could certainly get through it, but be in no doubt that the outcome would be a failure of statecraft.”
Boris Johnson (born 1964) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Johnson tells Varadkar no-deal Brexit 'would be a failure' BBC News (9 September 2019)
“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) said by 1982 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone sits in a mountain vale A robe of clouds, rainbows for tassels The fragrant forest is the place to live The road has been long and difficult With a heart full of doubt and regret A life has passed and nothing has been accomplished Others call it failure I stand alone devoted to this Cold Mountain life”
Hanshan (born 800) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, "I want to know where I'll die so I'll never go there." We want to see what has caused businesses to go bad. The biggest thing that kills them is complacency. ... The danger would always be that you rest on your laurels.”
Warren Buffett (born 1930) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know.”
John Holt (1923–1985) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How Children Learn (1967).
“I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature," he said, irritated at my failure to respond. "Nature's virtue is intact," I reassured him. "I just know some different laws.”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once he had been so formidable that he was surrounded by enemies. Now even his enemies has lost interest in him. What clearer sign of failure could you find than that?”
Orson Scott Card (born 1951) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source