Quotes about failure
page 5

“The great moral lesson which Saul's history leaves for the instruction of mankind is this: That without true piety the finest qualities of character and the highest position in society will utterly fail to make a true and noble man. If Saul's heart had been true to God, he would have been one of the grandest specimens of humanity; but, lacking this true obedience to God, he made his life an utter failure, and his character amoral wreck.”

William Mackergo Taylor (1829–1895) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 453.

Life, God, History, Heart

“Leaders and managers do not have to risk lives, profit, or mission failure because they failed to plan for a crisis. Do not allow yourself to be put on the defense by changing circumstances. No one enjoys wasting time, but don't be reluctant to call a meeting just to discuss something that might happen. Remember the oil filter theory. Rather than disobey your instincts and proceed with the status quo or embark on a risky course, invest some planning time in your business. Control your risks. Identify important decision points. Forecast potential crisis. Apply the six hour model. A little time spent discussing your business is never wasted.”

Wheeler L. Baker (1938) President of Hargrave Military Academy

Source: Crisis Management: A Model For Managers (1993), p. 74

Business, Decision, Change, Time

“[About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure."”

C. A. R. Hoare (1934) British computer scientist

The Emperor's Old Clothes

“The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

“Learning to Live with Ambiguity”
Clearing the Ground (1986)

Understanding, Evil, Success

“Poetry's only crucial attribute is rhythm. This is its heartbeat. This makes it memorable. If the rhythm falters, then the poem dies of heart failure.”

Michael Longley (1939) poet

Heart

“Harry Dresden: We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind-graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, White Night (2007), Chapter 31

Love, Life, Pain, Hope

“So far, twenty-two people have received the Nobel award in economics. Not one of them has been female—so, to judge only from the past, the most important thing to do if you want to be a Nobel laureate is to be male. I hasten to add that the absence of females is not, I believe, attributable to male chauvinist bias on the part of the Swedish Nobel Committee. I believe that the economics profession as a whole would have been nearly unanimous that, during the period in question, only one female candidate met the relevant standards—the English economist Joan Robinson, who has since died. The failure of the Nobel Committee to award her a prize may well have reflected bias but not sex bias. The economists here will understand what I am talking about. … A second requirement is to be a U. S. citizen. Twelve of the twenty-two recipients of the Nobel Prize were from the United States, four from the United Kingdom, two from Sweden, and one each from four other countries. … Of the twelve Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in economics, nine either studied or taught at the University of Chicago. So the next lesson is to go to the University of Chicago.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

"Milton Friedman" in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates

People, Sex, Understanding, Question

“(Henry Clarendon IV:) "Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?"”

Raymond Chandler book Playback

Source: Playback (1958), chapter 17

Life, God, Happiness, Art

“Demanding that wolf populations be allowed to continue to increase is not only a false conservation goal, but also a counterproductive tactic that is bound for short-term failure. It is strategically preferable to promote wolf range expansion and to accept reduction of unacceptable levels of conflict through scientifically planned and managed culling rather than through uncontrolled poaching. Full protection of wolf populations living near, or interspersed with, human settlements leads sooner or later to surplus wolves being killed, legally or illegally. Opposing wolf killing altogether implies accepting that all wolves will eventually be removed from these areas, whereas accepting some wolf control will allow wolves over much larger ranges. This vision requires a fundamental shift in the way wolves are perceived by folks who consider every wolf a symbol of the conservation battle or an animal with special rights among all other species. In the end, this approach probably will yield many more wolves than we could afford to keep in a few fully protected areas, no matter how large.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

Way, Wolf, Animals, Falseness

“The ultimate guide to decision should be our estimate at the time of the nature and extent of the American interest. There may be good reasons to use our resources to resist a troublemaking power which commits aggression against a weak and friendly state if the subversion of that state would be a significant gain to the troublemaker or a significant loss to us. Even then, we should have a reasonably accurate and encouraging estimate of the chances of success before we act. We cannot afford to stake our world standing on a lost cause or on one with unduly high risks of failure.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Responsibility and Response (1967), p. 49

World, Nature, Decision, Loss

“Booze, pot, too much sex, failure in one's private life, too much attrition, too much recognition, too little recognition. Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

As quoted in The Sunday Herald http://web.archive.org/web/20071112125539/http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1824217.0.norman_mailer_1923_2007.php [Scotland] (11 November 2007)

Life, Sex

““It’s a Texan’s attitude toward risk, reward and failure I’m talking about. It’s how they handle life. They live it big.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Life

“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Thinking, Success

“A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Four in America (1933)

“I never believed, as many Marxists professed to do, that normative principles were irrelevant to the socialist movement, that, since the movement was of oppressed people fighting for their own liberation, there was no room or need for specifically moral inspiration in it. I thought no such thing partly for the plain reason that I observed enormous selfless dedication among the active communists who surrounded me in my childhood, and partly for the more sophisticated reason that the self-interest of any oppressed producer would tell him to stay at home, rather than to risk his neck in a revolution whose success or failure would be anyhow unaffected by his participation in it. Revolutionary workers and, a fortiori, bourgeois fellow-travellers without a particular material interest in socialism, must perforce be morally inspired.”

Gerald Cohen (1941–2009) Canadian philosopher

G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality https://books.google.com/books?id=oeUQjOLNY-wC&pg=PA3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3

People, Travel, Home, Success

“Each man's place in the social scheme of his village is know; the contribution which he must make to the work and ceremonial of the village and the share of the whole which he will receive back again are likewise defined. For failure to receive what is due to him, he is fined even more heavily than for failure to give that which is due from him. Just as a man must accept his privileges as well as discharge his duties, so is he also the guardian of his own status and if, as may happen to a high caste, that status is affronted, he himself must perform a ceremony to restore it.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 7

“No system of judicature can be suggested in which occasionally failure to insure complete justice may not arise.”

Henry Hawkins, 1st Baron Brampton (1817–1907) British judge

The Queen v. Miles (1890), L. R. 24 Q. B. 433.

Justice

“Hayek did not believe that the same sort of prediction—and therefore control—that is possible in the natural sciences is attainable in the realm of society. At best, he thought, only a “pattern” of the future can be predicted in social life. He thought that to attempt to formulate laws of societal development akin to the laws of the physical sciences, as Marx attempted, is doomed to failure.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Life, Law, Nature, Science

“A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There's only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model(too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rust bucket most of us got for our first ride, it's more complex. There's coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There's that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None of it means it's broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be dealt with. Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 11

People, Cars, Way, Learning

“Unable to grasp the importance of Black women’s intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and Blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas. While it could be argued that this failure represents an absence of political will to include Black women, I believe that it reflects an uncritical and disturbing acceptance of dominant ways of thinking about discrimination. Consider first the definition of discrimination that seems to be operative in antidiscrimination law: Discrimination which is wrongful proceeds from the identification of a specific class or category; either a discriminator intentionally identifies this category, or a process is adopted which somehow disadvantages all members of this category.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women, Law, Way, Nature

“In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that dies not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny. The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

As quoted in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
1960s

Food, Music, Freedom

“The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over 30 millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.”

Jasper Fforde (1961) British novelist

Lost In A Good Book (2002), ch. 4a, p. 67

Life, Happiness, World, Success

“I want, however, to conclude by calling attention to a less visible form of social action: norms of social behavior, including ethical and moral codes. I suggest as one possible interpretation that they are reactions of society to compensate for market failures. It is useful for individuals to have some trust in each other's word. In the absence of trust it would become very costly to arrange for alternative sanctions and guarantees, and many opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation would have to be, foregone.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Kenneth Arrow, “The Organization of Economic Activity: Issues Pertinent to the Choice of Market versus Non-market Allocation” (1969)
1950s-1960s

Behavior

“I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure.”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

World of Colm Tóibín, writer http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9108553/World-of-Colm-Toibin-writer.html, The Daily Telegraph (27 February 2012)

Books, Study

“Economists can take a good deal of credit for the stabilization policies which have been followed in most Western countries since 1945 with considerable success. It is easy to generate a euphoric and self-congratulatory mood when one compares the twenty years after the first World War, 1919-39, with the twenty years after the second, 1945-65. The first twenty years were a total failure; the second twenty years, at least as far as economic policy is concerned, have been a modest success. We have not had any great depression; we have not had any serious financial collapse; and on the whole we have had much higher rates of development in most parts of the world than we had in the 1920’s and 1930’s, even though there are some conspicuous failures. Whether the unprecedented rates of economic growth of the last twenty years, for instance in Japan and Western Europe, can be attributed to economics, or whether they represent a combination of good luck in political decision making with the expanding impact of the natural and biological sciences on the economy, is something we might argue. I am inclined to attribute a good deal to good luck and non-economic forces, but not all of it, and even if economics only contributed 10 percent, this would amount to a very handsome rate of return indeed, considering the very small amount of resources we have really put into economics.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 9

War, World, Mood, Nature

“We humanitarians, as our name suggests, believe that man has an ethical duty to man. We believe that the value of any system is measured by the consideration given to all human beings, not just to a favored class: and by that standard, our present system is a miserable failure.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 10 (p. 120)

“The Arab world has seen elections before. However, virtually all of them were artificial affairs, their outcomes never in doubt. They were in the end celebrations of one version or another of autocracy, never a repudiation of them. That kind of state-management is not what has just taken place in Iraq. Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one's own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out. No wonder the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world are so worried, and no wonder they were so hostile to everything that happened in Iraq since the overthrow of the Saddam regime. They had longed for failure. They trotted out the tired old formulas of anti-Americanism to impart legitimacy to the so-called Iraqi "resistance to American occupation." But the people of Iraq have put an end to all that. En masse, ordinary people took to the streets in the second great Iraqi revolt against the politics of barbarism exemplified by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's immortal words: "We have declared a bitter war against the principle of democracy and all those who seek to enact it."”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (February 7, 2005)

Hostility, War, People, World

“The decent people in this administration — mainly career military brass and Condi's circle — are finally pushing back against the war crimes of Cheney and Rumsfeld. But the Bush mojo is the same. They don't actually care about the effectiveness of their policies, just how they can be used as wedge issues. Last summer, Karl Rove was determined to use torture and Gitmo as his electoral path to retaining the Congress. He thought he could portray the Democrats as weak on terror. Of course, only cowards and failures use torture. And how many Democrats or Republicans could have made us more vulnerable to more terror than Bush has these past five years?”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"The Alternative to Torture" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/the_alternative.html The Daily Dish (30 May 2007)

War, People, Past, Summer

“A superintendent of a road fifty miles in length can give its business his professional attention and may be constantly on the line engaged in the direction of its details; each person is personally known to him, and all questions in relation to its business are at once presented and acted upon; and any system however imperfect may under such circumstances prove comparatively successful.
In the government of a five hundred miles in length a very different state exists. Any system which might be applicable to the business and extent of a short road would be found entirely inadequate to the wants of a long one. and I am fully convinced that in the want of system perfect in its details, properly adapted and vigilantly enforced, lies the true secret of their [the large roads’] failure; and that this disparity of cost per mile in operating long and short roads, is not produced by a difference in length, but is in proportion to the perfection of the system adopted.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 34: Third paragraph. Cited in: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1962). Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise. p. 21-22

Secret, Question, Business, Success

“On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

People, Success

“A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 159

Success

“It was Plato who determined once and for all the cultural meaning of imitation, but this meaning is truncated, torn from the essential dimension of acquisitive behavior, which is also the dimension of conflict. If the behavior of certain higher animals, particularly the apes, seems to foreshadow human behavior, it does so almost exclusively, perhaps, because the role of acquisitive mimesis is so important in their behavior, although it is not as central as it is for the human being. If one ape observes another reach for an object, it is immediately tempted to imitate the gesture. It also happens that the animal visibly resists the temptation, and if the imitative gesture amuses us by reminding us of human beings, the failure to complete it, that is to say the repression of what already can be nearly defined as a desire, amuses us even more. It makes the animal a sort of brother to us by showing it subject to the same fundamental rule as humanity—that of preventing conflict, which the convergence of two or several avid hands toward one and the same object cannot help but provoke.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 4.

Behavior, Help, Animals

“Nowhere have REH’s epistemological flaws and empirical disappointments been more apparent than in efforts to model financial market outcomes, which are largely driven by participants’ expectations. Beginning with Robert Shiller’s (1981) pathbreaking paper, research has shown that REH models are unable to explain the basic features of fluctuations and risk in stock markets. Likewise, in their magisterial work on the current state of international macroeconomics, Maurice Obstfeld and Kenneth Rogoff (1996: 625) concluded that “the undeniable difficulties that international economists encounter in empirically explaining nominal exchangerate movements are an embarrassment, but one shared with virtually any other field that attempts to explain asset price data.” The failures of REH explanations of aggregate outcomes gave rise to alternative approaches, most notably behavioral finance models. However, sober assessments even by the likes of Obstfeld and Rogoff did not dispel the faith of most economists that REH models would one day be able to explain financial market outcomes and macroeconomic performance.”

Roman Frydman (1948) American economist

"Which Way Forward for Macroeconomics and Policy Analysis?" 2013

Faith, Disappointment, Behavior, Effort

“The only thing as bad as bad comedy is bad action. Bad Boys II has plenty of both. In fact, those two things are all it has, unless you count the small helping of bad drama. When it comes to this movie, the word "bad" initially seems highly appropriate. But Bad Boys II isn't just bad — it's a catastrophic violation of every aspect of cinema that I as a film critic hold dear. It seems to have been constructed with terms like "unwatchable" and "godawful" as its slogans. There are motion picture failures every year — the resumes of Hollywood players are littered with them. But, when something this big — a would-be blockbuster with recognizable names in the cast and crew — collapses in such a spectacular fashion, it's worth taking note. Think of how many starving children could have been fed with the money that was poured into [director] Michael Bay's latest sinkhole.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=293 of Bad Boys II (2002). Half-star reviews

Money, Children, Boy, Fashion

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.”

Mary Pickford (1892–1979) Canadian-American actress

"Why Not Try God?", Chapter 6 (newspaper serial), appeared in St. Petersburg Times, 25 January 1936, sect. 2, p. 3 http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=SQxPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=500DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4725,3554118&dq=pickford+not-the-falling-down&hl=en

Hope, Life, Moving On, For Men

“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1990s

Success

“Tolstoy set for himself the highest ideal that has ever been given to the world, and Tolstoy failed. He has had pointed at him fingers of scorn, and very unworthy fingers they were, but who has the right to judge Tolstoy for failure to live perfectly a life that has for two thousand years been an unattainable ideal to millions of earnest souls?”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 53

Life, World, Soul

“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Attributed to Andrew S. Grove in: William J. Baumol et al (2007) Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth. p. 228
New millennium

Success

“For Greek democracy failed, and the reasons for its failure are full of instruction. The great ruling ideas which the Greeks gave to the world, ideas which England later was to absorb and spread over a quarter of the globe, freedom and self-government, social equality and civic patriotism, these were corrupted by demagogues and flatterers of the people. It was so fatally easy to think that freedom meant doing what you like, that one man was not only as good as another but equally able to fill any office whatsoever, that majorities could do no wrong, that you could make Utopian laws for your own country without regard to what other nations or other empires were doing…Freedom of speech was stifled and public men who refused to advocate pleasures for the public multitude were banished. Politicians rivalled one another in bribing the electorate.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 35-36.
1930

Men, People, Pleasure, World

“Success, even in a comparatively limited field, is some compensation for failure in a wider field of endeavour.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

p, 125
Squaring the Circle (1913)

Success

“With love, one is also constantly planting the seeds for the success or failure of a partnership, and knowing this, we are especially responsible for the happiness or suffering of those who have opened up to us. The increased intimacy in love relationships leads to an exceptionally fast ripening of both beings’ good and bad impressions in mind.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Buddha & Love: Timeless Wisdom for Modern Relationships (2012)

Love, Happiness, Suffering, Success

“[On 2006 Israel-Lebanese war] ".. the net result is you have an Israeli government in disarray and a United States administration so identified with Israeli failure right now that it hurts the United States around the world."”

Andrea Mitchell

Washington Week http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/transcripts/transcript081806.html, August 18, 2006

War, World, Hurt

“It was a global depression, had many causes, the whole story requires you to look at the whole international system. But policy errors in United States, as well as abroad, did play an important role. And in particular as I said, the Federal Reserve failed in this first challenge in both parts of its mission. It did not use monetary policy aggressively to prevent deflation and the collapse in the economy, so it failed in its economic stability function. And it didn't adequately perform its function as lender of last resort allowing many bank failures and a resulting contraction in credit and also with the money supply. So, in that respect, again, the Fed did not fulfill its intended mission.”

Ben Bernanke (1953) American economist

Lecture 1: Origins and Mission of the Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis (2012)

Money, Error, Parting

“Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Paris Review interview (1958)

Understanding, Fight

“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”

John Keats Endymion

Preface
Endymion (1818)

Hell

“Even as with the American rejection of the League of Nations, our failure to live up to our obligations to the United Nations is led by a handful of willful senators who choose to pursue their narrow, selfish political objectives at the cost of our nation's conscience.
They pander to and are supported by the Christian Coalition and the rest of the religious right wing. Their leader, Pat Robertson, has written that we should have a world government but only when the messiah arrives. Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil!
This small but well-organized group, has intimidated both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration. It has attacked each of our Presidents since FDR for supporting the United Nations. Robertson explains that these Presidents were and are the unwitting agents of Lucifer.
The only way we who believe in the vision of a democratic world federal government can effectively overcome this reactionary movement is to organize a strong educational counteroffensive stretching from the most publicly visible people in all fields to the humblest individuals in every community. That is the vision and the program of the World Federalist Association.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

UN Address (1999)

People, World, Education, Way

“The masses had already confused the meanings of Tasawwuf and it was believed that Sufis are those miserable failures in the world, who escape reality and pass their time as recluses in dark corners of oratories or mosques and that, they are incapable of self-sustenance and cannot courageously face the rigors of practical life. But this concept is not correct. The real Tasawwuf was taught by the Holy Prophet-SAW himself to his students, the Companions.”

Ameer Muhammad Akram Awan (1934–2017) Pakistani Sufi leader

Life, World, Courage, Reality

“Diophantus shows great Adroitness in selecting the unkown, especially with a view to avoiding an adfected quadratic…. The most common and characteristic of Diophantus' methods is his use of tentative assumptions which is applied in nearly every problem of the later books. It consists in assigning to the unknown a preliminary value which satisfies one or two only of the necessary conditions, in order that, from its failure to satisfy the remaining conditions, the operator may perceive what exactly is required for that purpose…. a third characteristic of Diophantus [is]… the use of the symbol for the unknown in different senses…. The use of tentative assumptions leads again to another device which may be called… the method of limits. This may best be illustrated by a particular example. If Diophantus wishes to find a square lying between 10 and 11, he multiplies these numbers by successive squares till a square lies between the products. Thus between 40 and 44, 90 and 99 no square lies, but between 160 and 176 there lies the square 169. Hence x^2 = \tfrac{169}{16} will lie between the proposed limits.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Lie, Books, Lying, Problem

“It is always difficult to know which is rumor and which is fact, more so in a place like Nigeria. Certainly, it is clear that the forces of law and order have tended to fail the citizenry. It is equally true that under Obasanjo’s government, though called democratic, more people have been killed for various reasons; that life has not been secured under his government. It is equally true that throughout his government in the two years, Nigeria has had ethnic problems. These are factors, I suppose, with which one can judge the success or failure of Obasanjo’s government. And it is also the factors that would indicate to you that there are underlying problems of Nigeria that need to be looked into and that if Obasanjo is not looking well into them, then he is not doing his job. That’s how I see it.”

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933–2011) Nigerian politician and military leader

9 July, 2001, as quoted by Rudolph Okonkwo, My Last Interview With Dim Chukwuemeka Ojukwu - Rudolf Okonkwo http://saharareporters.com/column/my-last-interview-dim-chukwuemeka-ojukwu-rudolf-okonkwo, Sahara Reporters (26 November, 2011)

Life, People, Law, Problem

“Working at Perfekt,
Got me down on my knees.
Success to failure,
Just a matter of degrees.
Working at Perfekt,
Got me down on my knees…”

Geddy Lee (1953) vocalist, bassist, and keyboardist for the Canadian rock group Rush

"Working at Perfekt"

Success

“For every dollar spent in failure, learn a dollar’s worth of lesson.”

Jesse Robbins (1978) American entrepreneur

Quoted in article by Eric Ries about lean startup movement. http://venturehacks.com/articles/five-whys-2

Learning

“Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#440
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“Talked at lunch with a gentleman just returned from Japan, who told me some disturbing things about the influences behind our policies of extreme democratization and de-concentration of economic life in Japan.
Of all the failures of United States policy in the wake of World War II, history will rate as the most grievous our failure to approach realistically the responsibilities of power over the defeated nations which we ourselves courted by the policy of unconditional surrender.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

January 30, 1948
The Kennan Diaries

Life, War, World, History

“[Engineering] is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolades he wants.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Excerpted from Chapter 11 "The Profession of Engineering"
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1929 (1951)

Life, Men, Money, People

“Life itself seeks fulfillment as plants seek sunlight. The Universe did not create Life in the hope that the failure of the majority would underscore the success of the few. Spirtiuality atleast, we live in a democracy, an equal opportunity society.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p.xiv

Life, Hope, Democracy, Universe

“Great achievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.”

Larry Ellison (1944) American internet entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist

Evan Elite : Lesson #4: Break Through That Wall http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/649/Lesson-4-Break-Through-That-Wall.html.

Fear, Success

“I have no right to risk. No, that's not quite correct. I have no right to failure. And I don't trust myself anymore. I don't know what's happened to my edge. Lost it in a strange land.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)

“If we're going to consider failure to comply with UN directives a good reason for wrecking a country with cruise missiles, hey, I can think of a country in the Middle East which is in violation of a lot more UN directives than Iraq is. Israel has consistently thumbed its nose at UN directives, and no one in Washington has ever told Israel, "Comply or get hit." Let's understand one fundamental fact. This crusade against Iraq isn't about the United Nations or international security or stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It's about making the Middle East safe for Israel to continue bullying its neighbors and stealing from them. Every other explanation is lies and hypocrisy. And we really can expect a bigger dose of lies and hypocrisy than usual as the warmongers work to get this war against Iraq started. The media bosses will trot more generals and politicians in front of the TV cameras and have them bluster patriotically about how we're not going to let Saddam Hussein get away with it any longer, by god, and they'll show groups of military personnel cheering when they're told that they're being shipped out to the Persian Gulf to kick Saddam Hussein's behind and keep him from getting away with whatever it is he's getting away with, which mainly seems to be running his country the way he wants to instead of the way the United Nations tells him. They will work overtime at convincing the couch potatoes and the mindless yahoos who like to wave flags and shout patriotic slogans that destroying Iraq really is an act of American patriotism. And as long as the number of Americans killed in a Jewish war against Iraq remains small, the flag-waving yahoos and the bought politicians ought to be able to drown out any dissent from Americans like me who believe that we don't have any reasonable justification for waging such a war. And keeping casualties small ought to be easy, so long as it remains strictly a high-tech war, with us launching missiles against defenseless targets from many miles away. Of course, sometimes wars get out of hand, and unexpected things happen. If the Jews manage to get Iran involved in the war also -- and that's what they really want to do, what they really need to do -- then I think we stand a pretty good chance of seeing some major terrorist activity in the United States. I know that if I were Osama bin Laden, I'd have been spending my time getting ready for just such a development ever since Bill Clinton blew up that pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. I'd be putting my teams into place in the United States, assembling materials, choosing targets, and waiting for the Jews to provide justification for me to begin killing Americans on a significant scale. Of course, whether Osama bin Laden is as resourceful and as capable as he's said to be remains to be seen. Personally, I have very little faith in the ability of these flea-bitten Muslims to get things done. But we'll see.”

William Luther Pierce (1933–2002) American white nationalist

Why War? (November 21, 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20070324011124/http://www.natvan.com/pub/1998/112198.txt, American Dissident Voices Broadcast of November 21, 1998 http://archive.org/details/DrWilliamPierceAudioArchive308RadioBroadcasts. 1990s, 1990

God, War, Faith, Way

“I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people's accomplishments; the front page nothing but man's failures.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

As quoted in Sports Illustrated (22 July 1968)
Variants:
I always turn to the sports page first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.
As quoted in Best Sports Stories : 1975 (1976) by Irving T. Marsh
I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.
As quoted in The Norton Book of Sports (1992) by George Plimpton, p. 470
1960s

People, Sport

“Modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. … Phrases … are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection, but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 96-97.

“We yield to none in our love, admiration and respect for the Buddha-the Dharma-the Sangha. They are all ours. Their glories are ours and ours their failures.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

Hindutva, p. 12.

Love

“Remember this central truth. Your enemy is there because he, too, has weighed the consequences of failure and accepts them. Play always to win, because nothing else matters”

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

Truth

“My response to Bernie Sanders' you know uh stories you know fairytales is that uh the failure of capitalism is still much better than the success of socialism.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

Fairytale, Success

“Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 16, p. 144

Men, Stupidity, Thinking, Suffering

“If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his or her failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril.
The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

Life, Understanding, Nature

“I am deeply ashamed at my failure to serve His Majesty.”

Shoichi Yokoi (1915–1997) Japanese World War II Soldier

Announcement to journalists at Tokyo airport, 2 February 1972, Dictionary of Quotations, Chambers: Edinburgh, U.K, 2005, p. 935
Quote

“I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-day's failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles — a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward — if the road was always smooth and pleasant. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Address to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (8 July 1896)

God, Beauty, Thinking, Effort

“It's a failure only if you don't get anything out of it, Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways that a light bulb did not work; yet we have lights today.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 36

Way, Light

“There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

"The Way to Fame" HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/books?&id=FWxbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22there+is+a+great+deal+to+be+said+for+the+arts+for+one+thing+they+offer+the+only+career+in+which+commercial+failure+is+not+necessarily+discreditable%22&pg=PA9#v=onepage

Art

“QUESTION: Is there a reason for the pen name? One you’d be willing to share, I suppose. As in, is it because you’re actually a secret CIA agent and/or Russian spy, or merely because you don’t ever want your mother knowing what you’ve written?
JTH: My mother and the rest of my family don’t know that I have written the novels. Those people I know who aren’t close friends see me as a failure by the American standards of success. Being a “failure” in such a way has been a continual lesson. It’s helped me realize that we make quick judgments of others based on little real information. We assume so much – but don’t know the secrets held within the heart.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

From Interviews

People, Secret, Family, Way

“Some may wish to argue that Hayek was simply born with a sort of natural pessimism or cynicism, and that this generated his long standing belief in the inherent limitations that humans face when they try to intervene in social phenomena. Perhaps. But it is also possible that this view was the product of his having come of age during the final collapse of an already broken-down empire, of having experienced the multiple forms of disaster that surrounded postwar Vienna and enveloped interwar central Europe, and of having witnessed the failures of various high-minded social experiments to achieve anything like what their exponents had promised. In bearing witness to so much tragedy Hayek was again very much a part of the larger Austrian tradition. His famed ‘‘epistemic pessimism’’ may well have been another result of that larger experience.”

Bruce Caldwell (economist) (1952) economic historian

"Hayek and the Austrian tradition", in Edward Feser(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hayek (2006)

Age, Nature, Parting

“I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist (1910), pg. 116
1910s

Life, Education

“Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.”

Brian Eno (1948) English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist

December 7, 1995, p. 272
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

World, Art

“Religion’s preferred punishment is almost always death, regardless of the crime. But the death penalty is a statistical failure just like all their proposed solutions to other problems always are. Here in the US, the states that still have the death penalty also have the highest murder rates; its a negative correlation. The problem there is one of society, the conditions imposed and the types of responses that are culturally coaxed. When murder happens, and that person is caught and tried, we should remove them as a threat, and whether they are imprisoned, institutionalized, or what have you should be determined by the particulars in each case.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, How is secular humanist governance better than theocracy? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/09/07/how-is-secular-humanist-governance-better-than-theocracy/ (September 7, 2013)

Death, Religion, Penalty, Problem

“Fear is bound to disappear when you realize that failure is not something shameful, damaging, destructive, or painful, but something natural.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

The Wings of Joy (1997)

Pain, Fear, Nature

“War is always a failure. It means we’ve failed in diplomacy and we’ve failed in talking to one another.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

quoting A C Grayling
"Complete Hero" (2009)

War

“Here's what we shouldn't do. We shouldn't import failed criminal justice policies from the United States. Mega prisons and mandatory minimums have failed in the United States, we've got to learn from the failure of the American criminal justice policy. Get tough on guns, invest in crime prevention and invest in victim services”

Michael Ignatieff (1947) professor at Harvard Kennedy School and former Canadian politician

English Language Leaders' Debate, April 12, 2011, http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20110413/main-election-110413/20110413?s_name=election2011

Justice, Learning

“Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

"Missing Dates" (1937), line 1; cited from John Haffenden (ed.) The Complete Poems (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 79.
The Complete Poems

Effort

“To my complete surprise, that exposure to out-of-date scientific theory and practice radically undermined some of my basic conceptions about the nature of science and the reasons for its special success.
Those conceptions were ones I had previously drawn partly from scientific training itself and partly from a long-standing avocational interest in the philosophy of science. Somehow, whatever their pedagogic utility and their abstract plausibility, those notions did not at all fit the enterprise that historical study displayed. Yet they were and are fundamental to many discussions of science, and their failures of verisimilitude therefore seemed thoroughly worth pursuing. The result was a drastic shift in my career plans, a shift from physics to history of science and then, gradually, from relatively straightforward historical problems back to the more philosophical concerns that had initially led me to history.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Preface

History, Nature, Problem, Study

“1. The standard neoclassical model the formal articulation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the contention that market economies will ensure economic efficiency provides little guidance for the choice of economic systems, since once information imperfections (and the fact that markets are incomplete) are brought into the analysis, as surely they must be, there is no presumption that markets are efficient.
2. The Lange-Lerner-Taylor theorem, asserting the equivalence of market and market socialist economies, is based on a misguided view of the market, of the central problems of resource allocation, and (not surprisingly, given the first two failures) of how the market addresses those basic problems.
3. The neoclassical paradigm, through its incorrect characterization of the market economies and the central problems of resource allocation, provides a false sense of belief in the ability of market socialism to solve those resource allocation problems. To put it another way, if the neoclassical paradigm had provided a good description of the resource allocation problem and the market mechanism, then market socialism might well have been a success. The very criticisms of market socialism are themselves, to a large extent, criticisms of the neoclassical paradigm.
4. The central economic issues go beyond the traditional three questions posed at the beginning of every introductory text: What is to be produced? How is it to be produced? And for whom is it to be produced? Among the broader set of questions are: How should these resource allocation decisions be made? Who should make these decisions? How can those who are responsible for making these decisions be induced to make the right decisions? How are they to know what and how much information to acquire before making the decisions? How can the separate decisions of the millions of actors decision makers in the economy be coordinated?
5. At the core of the success of market economies are competition, markets, and decentralization. It is possible to have these, and for the government to still play a large role in the economy; indeed it may be necessary for the government to play a large role if competition is to be preserved. There has recently been extensive confusion over to what to attribute the East Asian miracle, the amazingly rapid growth in countries of this region during the past decade or two. Countries like Korea did make use of markets; they were very export oriented. And because markets played such an important role, some observers concluded that their success was convincing evidence of the power of markets alone. Yet in almost every case, government played a major role in these economies. While Wade may have put it too strongly when he entitled his book on the Taiwan success Governing the Market, there is little doubt that government intervened in the economy through the market.
6. At the core of the failure of the socialist experiment is not just the lack of property rights. Equally important were the problems arising from lack of incentives and competition, not only in the sphere of economics but also in politics. Even more important perhaps were problems of information. Hayek was right, of course, in emphasizing that the information problems facing a central planner were overwhelming. I am not sure that Hayek fully appreciated the range of information problems. If they were limited to the kinds of information problems that are at the center of the Arrow-Debreu model consumers conveying their preferences to firms, and scarcity values being communicated both to firms and consumers then market socialism would have worked. Lange would have been correct that by using prices, the socialist economy could "solve" the information problem just as well as the market could. But problems of information are broader.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Whither Socialism?

Source: Whither Socialism? (1994), Ch. 1 : The Theory of Socialism and the Power of Economic Ideas

Books, Way, Communication, Question

“I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.”

Michael Malone (1942) American screenwriter, novelist

The Guardian (London, July 7, 1989)

Faith, Thinking

“When failure is not an option, success can be expensive.”

Peter Stibrany (1959) Canadian aerospace engineer

Conference paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264346445_The_Microsat_Way_in_Canada%5D Stibrany, P. and Carroll, K.A., "The Microsat Way in Canada," in Proc. ASTRO 2000 - 11th CASI Conference on Astronautics, Ottawa, Canada, 6-9 Nov. 2000. The quote is a play on the title of Gene Kranz's autobiography, "Failure Is Not An Option". (See the Discussion page for further contextual information.) The quote gained immediate currency within the MOST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOST_(satellite) development team. It started to spread when one of the MOST team members, Henry Spencer (one of the fathers of the open-source movement, a well-known long-time contributor to the sci.space newsgroups, and also MOST's Software Architect) began using this quote as his Usenet newsgroups .sig ( this being one example https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.space.history/Sl54b83g0jk%5B1-25%5D). The quote has gained wider currency since then, for example in this 2005 blog post by Rand Simberg. http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/005132.html More recently, the quote has been stated numerous times by Chris Lewicki, the CEO of the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Resources (e.g., here https://singularityhub.com/2017/08/17/space-startups-see-a-future-when-millions-of-people-live-and-work-in-space/?utm_content=buffer52ee3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter-su&utm_campaign=buffer), as well as by that company's Chairman, Peter Diamandis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_diamandis (e.g., here http://www.diamandis.com/blog/entrepreneurs-not-government-drive-innovation-heres-why), with others subsequently requoting them, such as here http://www.diamandis.com/blog/entrepreneurs-not-government-drive-innovation-heres-why and here http://vladdit.com/exponential-wisdom-episode-15-notes-driving-innovation/.

Success

“Do not get angry and lose your temper quickly over the mistakes and failures of those over whom you rule. On the contrary, be patient and sympathetic with them.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha, Letter 53: An order to Malik Al-Ashtar

“Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure does.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.122

Success

“You shouldn't be trapped in the failures of other people, you know? Some of you are so scared of going out, you go hang out with anybody. But you ought to go out there with God, He listens, and listens 24 hours a day. You keep your television on, you surround yourself with friends, but you're scared of God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. Never lose your reverence for Him. God is nothing to be joking about, but perfect love casts out fear.”

Rich Mullins (1955–1997) American christian musician

Plymouth, Michigan http://www.kidbrothers.net/words/concert-transcripts/plymouth-michigan-aug1597.html (August 15, 1997) In Concert

Love, Wisdom, God, People

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

Sense, Effort, Past, Future

“The most surprising and original part of [ Lucien Goldmann's] work is, however, the attempt to compare—without assimilating one to another—religious faith and Marxist faith: both have in common the refusal of pure individualism (rationalist or empiricist) and the belief in trans-individual values—God for religion, the human community for socialism. In both cases the faith is based on a wager—the Pascalian wager on the existence of God and the Marxist wager on the liberation of humanity—that presupposes risk, the danger of failure and the hope of success.”

Michael Löwy (1938) French sociologist

Source: The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=gyOHaZFpvL8C&pg=PA17

God, Faith, Religion, Hope

“Hurricane [Katrina] hit the Gulf Coast and destroyed much of the Gulf Coast — that was an act of God … Now what happened to New Orleans, that was a complete failure of the federal government. Complete negligence by the feds.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

in a speech to LSU students at the Manship School of Communications' Holliday Forum on January 27, 2006.

God

“It is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Age, Effort

“If you lean on a straight stick… [it] can resist your weight, despite its slenderness, as long as it remains straight; once it starts to bend, it will easily break. The danger of breaking increases with the deflection… [T]he danger of failure will diminish with the increased moment of inertia of the cross section, or if the same are of cross section should be maintained, by distributing the material in a hollow section.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

“If you examine the record of the so-called the anti-war movement in this country and imagine what would have happened had its counsel been listened to over the last 15 and more years, you would have a world in which the following would be the case:Saddam Hussein would be the owner and occupier of Kuwait, he would have succeeded in the annexation, not merely the invasion, but the abolition of an Arab and Muslim state that was a member of the Arab League and of the United Nations. And with these resources as we now know because he lost that war, he was attempting to equip himself with the most terrifying arsenal that it was possible for him to lay his hands on. That's one consequence of anti-war politics, that's what would have happened.In the meanwhile, Slobodan Milošević would have made Bosnia part of a greater Serbia, and Kosovo would have been ethnically cleansed and also annexed. The Taliban would be still in power in Afghanistan if the anti-war movement had been listened to, and al-Qaeda would still be their guests. And Saddam Hussein, with his crime family, would still be privately holding ownership over a terrorized people in a state that's been most aptly described as a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath it.Now if I had that record politically, I would be extremely modest, I wouldn't be demanding explanations from those of us who said it's about time that we stop this continual capitulation to dictatorship, to racism, to aggression and to totalitarian ideology. That we will not allow to be appeased in Iraq, the failures in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, and in Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And we take pride in having taken that position, and we take pride in our Iraqi and Kurdish friends who are conducting this struggle, on our behalves I should say.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. George Galloway debate http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2005/09/galloway_vs_hit.html, New York City (2005-09-14): On the 2003 invasion of Iraq 2000s, 2005

War, People, World, Family

“Pompous as only failures can be.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Alone

Source: Titus Alone (1959), Chapter 82 (p. 959)

“I really hope that the symbolism isn't lost on you four Superstars in the chamber right now, because it's killing me. Here's four extremely weak individuals that, every day, are locked inside a prison of addiction, like most of these people here today; and now, the four of you are locked inside the Elimination Chamber with me. And be sure, it's not me locked in here with you — it's you locked in here with me. And tomorrow morning, when you're nursing the pain and the wounds that this chamber and myself have caused you, I want you to remember that when your pod door opens and you came out and I defeated you, don't think of it as failure. Think of it as me saving you. [Standing over Rey Mysterio's pod] Think of it as me setting you free.
Punk: [To Undertaker, after elimination R-Truth] You'd better pray that your pod door opens last, 'cause when you come out, I'm gonna make you tap out, just like I did before. [To John Morrison] And I'm gonna prove to you that your decadent rock life will get you nowhere. I'm gonna prove to the world that straight-edge means I'm better than you! For those of you at home, feel free, place your hand on the screen and feel CM Punk flow through you!
Lawler: Matt, did you just put your hand on the screen?
Striker: Yes.
Lawler: Do you feel CM Punk flow through you?
Punk: Nobody can stop me!
Cole: Guys, the sermon's over in [checking the timer] three seconds.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Elimination Chamber - February 21, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

Life, Pain, People, Truth

“The fact is that Christian art failed at a deeper level. It failed not in execution but in conception and vision, and this failure was at bottom failure of Christian theology in which mysticism is rudimentary and peripheral. Christian theology has no concept of transcendence, non-attachment, recollectedness, equality (samatâ), liberation (moksha), the vast (bhûmâ) and the infinite (ananta), compassion (kurunâ), of cosmic action emanating from restfulness at the centre; therefore, it felt no call to try to convey them in its art-forms. A deeper iconography needed the support of a deeper theology and vision. This explains why Christian art has no equivalents of Far Eastern Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as Huxley notices. The Eastern tradition was shaped by Hindu religious thinking and sensibility. Hindu art tried to portray the inner man: the Man behind the man, the Eye behind the eye, the Seeing behind the seeing, man's inner prânika or life-currents, the nodal points in his subtle body where the individual meets the cosmic. It portrayed man's inner physiognomy. …. But they portrayed the external man; there was no portrayal of the inner man, the luminous man, the transcendental man.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Life, Art, Support, Thinking

“Agile development methodologies promise higher customer satisfaction, lower defect rates, faster development times and a solution to rapidly changing requirements. Plan-driven approaches promise predictability, stability, and high assurance. However, both approaches have shortcomings that, if left unaddressed, can lead to project failure. The challenge is to balance the two approaches to take advantage of their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Barry Boehm and Richard Turner. " Observations on balancing discipline and agility http://people.cs.aau.dk/~jeremy/SOE2011/resources/Boehm.pdf." Agile Development Conference, 2003. ADC 2003. Proceedings of the. IEEE, 2003.

Change, Time

“I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Originally from Herbert Bayard Swope (1882-1958); often attributed to Cosby, he actually cites this as a sound advice he once read elsewhere, in "Dr. Bill Cosby" in Ebony, Vol. 32, No. 8 (June 1977), p. 136
Misattributed

Success

“The UK can be proud of its real contribution to this unique system and its influence in bringing about effective human rights protection throughout the European continent. It would be deeply regrettable if it were to allow its commitment to that system to be called into question by a failure to defend it against its detractors or to offer its strong support for the vital work of the court.”

Nicolas Bratza (1945) British judge

"Britain should be defending European justice, not attacking it", The Independent, Tuesday 24 January 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nicolas-bratza-britain-should-be-defending-european-justice-not-attacking-it-6293689.html

Question, Support, Strong

“You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Game III,” p. 98
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Game”

Error, Success

“The long history of mankind is studded with convergences, perhaps most notably in social systems and the use of artefacts and technology. But for human history, set in the arrow of time, there appears to be one intolerable stumbling-block. This is the catastrophic failure in human values and decency.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 205.

History, Appearance, Time

Quotes about failure page 5

Quotes about failure
page 5