“Making the best of things is … a damn poor way of dealing with them…. My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.”

Source: Pygmalion & My Fair Lady

Remark to Thomas Creevey (18 June 1815), using the word nice in an older sense of "uncertain, delicately balanced", about the Battle of Waterloo. Creevy, a civilian, got a public interview with Wellington at headquarters, and quoted the remark in his book Creevey Papers (1903), in Ch. X, on p. 236; the phrase "a damned nice thing" has sometimes been paraphrased as "a damn close-run thing."
Context: It has been a damned serious business... Blucher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. … By God! I don't think it would have been done if I had not been there.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2005-06-02-tyson-saraceno_x.htm?csp=34
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1654125,00.html
On himself

Source: Glasshouse (2006), Chapter 2, “Experiment” (p. 30)

Source: The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life

Cited in Whitney Museum of American Art (1975 Brochure), "Minnie Evans" Call number ND237.E78 W43 1975

Remark to Thomas Creevey (18 June 1815), using the word nice in an older sense of "uncertain, delicately balanced", about the Battle of Waterloo. Creevy, a civilian, got a public interview with Wellington at headquarters, and quoted the remark in his book Creevey Papers (1903), in Ch. X, on p. 236; the phrase "a damned nice thing" has sometimes been paraphrased as "a damn close-run thing."

Art since 1940, strategies of being, Jonathan Fineberg, copyright Prentice Hall, Inc. 1995. ISBN 0 13 045469 9