“Any excuse for non-performance, no matter how valid, weakens character.”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Spencer W. Kimball18
President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1895–1985Related quotes
Harold Geneen (1910–1997) American businessman
Managing, Chapter Six (Leadership), p. 89.
“Human mind is capable of making up excuses to justify actions no matter how bad they were”
Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) Russian composer and pianist
Letter to Isaac Glikman, August 28, 1955; Josiah Fisk & Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (1997) p. 364.
Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher
Source: On the Pragmatics of Communication, 1998, p. 22
Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America
Labor Day Message to the nation http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3557 (3 September 1972) <br class="br">1970s
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Letter to James C. Conkling (1863)
Context: But the proclamation, as law, either is valid, or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life. Some of you profess to think its retraction would operate favorably for the Union. Why better after the retraction, than before the issue? There was more than a year and a half of trial to suppress the rebellion before the proclamation issued, the last one hundred days of which passed under an explicit notice that it was coming, unless averted by those in revolt, returning to their allegiance. The war has certainly progressed as favorably for us, since the issue of the proclamation as before. I know as fully as one can know the opinions of others, that some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion; and that, at least one of those important successes, could not have been achieved when it was, but for the aid of black soldiers. Among the commanders holding these views are some who have never had any affinity with what is called abolitionism, or with republican party politics; but who hold them purely as military opinions. I submit these opinions as being entitled to some weight against the objections, often urged, that emancipation, and arming the blacks, are unwise as military measures, and were not adopted, as such, in good faith.
Larry Brantley (1966) American stand-up comedian
Mohammad Ali Jauhar (1878–1931) Indian Muslim leader, activist, scholar, journalist and poet
Letter to Swami Shraddhananda, quoted in Arun Shourie - The World of Fatwas Or The Sharia in Action (2012, Harper Collins)