“What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?”

“For how long could we fail until we surrendered?”

“What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve.”

“I used to think that medicine and particularly surgery is just failed prevention. That if we could treat these people properly and, particularly, if we could do something about prevention, we could empty the hospital wards. It was probably false, but that's what I used to think.”

“Friends as we are, we would willingly keep your failings to ourselves — even from ourselves if we could, unless by knowing them we could deliver you from them.”

“It is an ancient custom, as ancient as the Roman Empire, to idolize those whom we honor, to make them larger than life, to give their marvelous accomplishments a magical and mystical origin. By exalting the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr. into a legendary tale that is annually told, we fail to recognize his humanity -- his personal and public struggles -- that are similar to yours and mine. By idolizing those whom we honor, we fail to realize that we could go and do likewise.”

“If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”

“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

“How many things would you attempt
If you knew you could not fail”

“We are not of what we feel or believe to do, we are of what we do or fail to do.”