Quotes about success
page 10

“A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.”

Robert Orben (1928) American magician and writer

Pete Goering (May 20, 2007) "A few tips for the graduates", The Topeka Capital-Journal, p. 1.
Attributed

Jacques Ellul photo
Imelda Marcos photo

“Ferdinand had foresight and unbelievable luck. His success actually bordered on fiction.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

As quoted in "Imelda and the Cash" by Werner Raffetseder in Saga magazine (April 1998).

Arthur Leonard Schawlow photo

“To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known.”

Arthur Leonard Schawlow (1921–1999) American physicist

as quoted by [Steven Chu and Charles H. Townes, Biographical Memoirs V.83, National Academies Press, 2003, http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10830, 0-309-08699-X, 201]

Jason Biggs photo

“The American Pie success has been so wonderful for me, but it's also locked me into a certain type of role. It's limited my options.”

Jason Biggs (1978) American actor

On debut in show Orange Is the New Black, interviewed in: — [December 4, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/q-a-jason-biggs-changes-stripes-in-orange-is-the-new-black-20130710, Rolling Stone, Q&A: Jason Biggs Changes Stripes in 'Orange Is the New Black', July 10, 2013, James Sullivan]

Lee Kuan Yew photo
Billie Holiday photo
Jasper Fforde photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
Joseph Dietzgen photo
Tom Clancy photo
Roy Moore photo

“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

Charles Lyell photo
William Westmoreland photo
Colm Tóibín photo

“A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

Colm Tóibín, novelist – portrait of the artist http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/19/colm-toibin-novelist-portrait-artist, The Guardian (19 February 2013)

William Ernest Henley photo
Viktor Orbán photo

“Naturally, when considering the whole issue of who will live in Europe, one could argue that this problem will be solved by successful integration. The reality, however, is that we’re not aware of any examples of successful integration… In countering arguments for successful integration, we must also point out that if people with diverging goals find themselves in the same system or country, it won’t lead to integration, but to chaos. It’s obvious that the culture of migrants contrasts dramatically with European culture. Opposing ideologies and values cannot be simultaneously upheld, as they are mutually exclusive. To give you the most obvious example, the European people think it desirable for men and women to be equal, while for the Muslim community this idea is unacceptable, as in their culture the relationship between men and women is seen in terms of a hierarchical order. These two concepts cannot be upheld at the same time. It’s only a question of time before one or the other prevails. Of course one could also argue that communities coming to us from different cultures can be re-educated. But we must see – and Bishop Tőkés also spoke about this – that now the Muslim communities coming to Europe see their own culture, their own faith, their own lifestyles and their own principles as stronger and more valuable than ours. So, whether we like it or not, in terms of respect for life, optimism, commitment, the subordination of individual interests and ideals, today Muslim communities are stronger than Christian communities. Why would anyone want to adopt a culture that appears to be weaker than their own strong culture? They won’t, and they never will! Therefore re-education and integration based on re-education cannot succeed.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz
Albert O. Hirschman photo
George Bernard Shaw photo

“I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I, preface http://books.google.com/books?id=MiJaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22I+had+not+achieved+a+success+but+I+had+provoked+an+uproar+and+the+sensation+was+so+agreeable+that+I+resolved+to+try+again%22&pg=PR13#v=onepage (1898)
1890s

“God made Homo sapiens a problem-solving creature. The trouble is that He gave us too many resources: too many languages, too many phases of life, too many levels of complexity, too many ways to solve problems, too many contexts in which to solve them, and too many values to balance.
First came the law, accounting, and history which looks backward in time for their values and decision-making criteria, but their paradigm (casuistry) cannot look forward to predict future consequences. Casuistry is overly rigid and does not account for statistical phenomena. To look forward man used two thousand years to evolve scientific method - which can predict the future when it discovers the laws of nature. In parallel, man evolved engineering, and later, systems engineering, which also anticipates future conditions. It took man to the moon, but it often did, and does, a poor job of understanding social systems, and also often ignores the secondary effects of its artifacts on the environment.
Environmental impact analysis was promoted by governments to patch over the weakness of engineering - with modest success - and it does not ignore history; but by not integrating with system design, it is also an incomplete philosophy. System design and architecture, or simply design, like science and engineering is forward-looking, and provides man with comforts and conveniences - if someone will tell them what problems to solve, and which requirements to meet. It rarely collects wisdom from the backward-looking methodologies, often overlooks ordinary operating problems in designing its artifacts, whether autos or buildings, and often ignores the principles of good teamwork.”

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

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

Arthur Jones (inventor) photo
Hannah Arendt photo
William H. Starbuck photo
Terry Gilliam photo
Daniel McCallum photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Stephen Decatur photo

“Our country – In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong.”

Stephen Decatur (1779–1820) United States Navy officer

Toast at a dinner in Norfolk, Virginia (April 1816) reported in Niles' Weekly Register (Baltimore, Maryland) 20 April 1816; as cited in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (2010), Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, p. 70
Variant: Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.
[emphasis added] This widely quoted version is attributed in Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Life of Stephen Decatur: A Commodore in the Navy of the United States (1846), C. C. Little and J. Brown, p. 443.
This statement produced the famous slogan "My country, right or wrong!" which itself produced famous responses by:
Carl Schurz "...if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."
Schurz, Carl, remarks in the Senate, February 29, 1872, The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287. See Wikisource for the complete speech.
G. K. Chesterton "'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'." -- A Defence of Patriotism
Variant: Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!

Daniel Levitin photo

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

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Hans Frank photo

“Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories, nor our own, have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here… For us the Jews are also exceptionally damaging because they are being such gluttons. There are an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps. 3.5 million. These 3.5 million Jews, we cannot shoot them, nor can we poison them. Even so, we can take steps which in some way or other will pave the way for their destruction, notably in connection with the grand measures to be discussed in the Reich. The General Government must become just as judenfrei (free of Jews) as the Reich!”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To senior members of his administration, December 16, 1941, quoted in "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: the final solution in history" - Page 302 - by Arno J. Mayer - History - 1988

Mengistu Haile Mariam photo
Haile Selassie photo

“Imagination, devotion, perseverance, together with divine grace, will assure your success.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address on the 18th anniversary of his coronation (2 November 1948)

Andrew Johnson photo
Irene Dunne photo

“Parading about in the latest gowns and making dull platitudes for an entire evening doesn't constitute social success in my book.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

How To Get Along In Hollywood (1948)

Hermann Hesse photo
Charles Lyell photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“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

Benoît Mandelbrot photo
Billie Piper photo

“People were dealing with CGI for the first time, so I think we were really unsure as to whether it would be a huge success or a big flop. … I thought the scripts were so good. It had a kind of domestic element which I'm not sure it ever had before. I think we were feeling quite confident about that. … In terms of whether it had a place in the world when it aired, I think everyone was quite unsure. I didn't know until it aired and people really seemed to like it.”

Billie Piper (1982) English singer, dancer and actress

On her role in the 21st century revival of Doctor Who, as quoted in "'I've heard that before!': Chris Evans cracks ex-wife jokes with Billie Piper as she appears on his show with new husband Laurence Fox" in The Daily Mail Reporter (22 November 2013) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2511885/Chris-Evans-cracks-ex-wife-jokes-Billie-Piper-appears-new-husband-Laurence-Fox.html

Alan Bennett photo
Joseph Heller photo

“Nothing fails like success.”

God Knows (1984)

William Hazlitt photo
A. James Gregor photo
Donald J. Trump photo

“So I said to myself, you know, nobody's ever going to know unless I run, because I'm really proud of my success.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Announcement speech https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-donald-trump-helped-democrats-pass-obamacare/2015/06/22/002f4c7c-18ea-11e5-ab92-c75ae6ab94b5_story.html (June 2015)
2010s, 2015

Edsger W. Dijkstra photo
Seneca the Younger photo

“Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law.”
rursus prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur; sontibus parent boni, ius est in armis, opprimit leges timor.

Hercules Furens (The Madness of Hercules), lines 251-253; (Amphitryon)
Alternate translation: Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. (translator unknown)
Alternate translation: Might makes right. (translator unknown).
Tragedies

Andrew S. Grove photo

“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

Laurell K. Hamilton photo

“After a good, successful torture, she was as happy as I ever saw her. I guess everyone needed a hobby.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Musings of Princess Meredith about her aunt, Queen Andais; p. 357
Merry Gentry series, A Stroke of Midnight (2005)

János Esterházy photo
Alfred Russel Wallace photo

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo

“Wellesley's success…appears to have been nothing more than an affair of a rear-guard, and is ridiculously magnified.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Letter to Lord Grenville (25 May 1809) on the Duke of Wellington's successes in the Peninsular War, quoted in Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815 (Yale University Press, 1996), p. 94.
1800s

Chris Cornell photo

“RockNet: Were you terribly uncomfortable at the recent Grammy Award Show?
Cornell: I don't know. It's just a strange subject. It's almost as if the music industry is patting itself on the back in a way. This was the seventh Grammy nomination for us and had we won one for our first nomination I would have had a really cool attitude about it because it would have meant that the people who were actually voting were paying attention to music for music's sake as opposed to some other reason.
I was happy that we were nominated because it was an independent record company and it was a low-profile record. We didn't win a Grammy until we'd sold several millions and it seems that what sells a lot is what wins, even though the record may or may not be any good, but that seems to be the requirement.
I'm not critical of the people who work in the music industry, and I appreciate the Grammy. (But) to me it's their party and it's not really mine. It's not for the musicians. It has more to do with the industry. You can tell after a Grammy period all the record labels and artists who won a bunch take out full-page ads in the trades gloating. That's fine. That's what they do, they sell records and they work really hard to develop careers. If they're into it, I'm not going to be disrespectful, but I'd hate for anyone to think that it's something that was a necessity for me or the rest of the band, or that it was a benchmark to us of legitimacy for us because it's not. It doesn't really matter that much to us. It seems like it's for someone else. I'd never get up and say that. If I was totally not into it, the best thing to do is to not show up.
Maybe ten years from now I'll reflect and say "wow, that happened and it was pretty unusual. Not every kid on the block gets to go up and pick up a Grammy Award."”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

It's just one more thing to take the focus away from what we like to do, which is to write music and make records and try not to think about anything whether it's how many records we sell or what people think of us.
For us, I think the key to success for being a band and always making good records is always going to be forgetting about everything else outside our own little band.
RockNet Interview: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, May 1, 1996 https://web.archive.org/web/19961114054327/http://www.rocknet.com/may96/soundgar.html,
Soundgarden Era

Norbert Wiener photo
Richard Garriott photo
Ginger Rogers photo

“Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work for her. Actually she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success.”

Ginger Rogers (1911–1995) American actress and dancer

Fred Astaire to Raymond Rohauser, Film Curator of the New York Gallery of Modern Art, at the San Francisco Film Festival, in 1966.
About

Jerome K. Jerome photo
Camille Paglia photo
Abby Martin photo
E. W. Hobson photo

“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)

“The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up.”

Howard Raiffa (1924–2016) American academic

Part III, Chapter 10, AMPO Versus City, p. 142.
The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982)

Lama Ole Nydahl photo

“The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.”

Gene Fowler (1890–1960) American journalist

Attributed without citation in Blythe Camenson (2002) How to Sell, Then Write Your Nonfiction Book. p. 188

Virginia Foxx photo

“This bill reminds me of the tactics of the former Soviet Union — and we know how successful that was.”

Virginia Foxx (1943) American politician

Referring to HR 2749: Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009
Quoted in [Kathryn A., Wolfe, http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000003182272, House Passes Sweeping Food Safety Bill, Congressional Quarterly, July 30, 2009, 2009-11-14]
Food Safety

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Austen Henry Layard photo

“I have always believed that successes would be the inevitable result if the two services, the army and the navy, had fair play, and if we sent the right man to fill the right place.”

Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) British politician (1817–1894)

Speech in Parliament (January 15, 1855), reported in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. cxxxviii. p. 2077; this can be contrasted witho Sydney Smith's statement "The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other" in Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1806).

Henry Adams photo

“…but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand and depart.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Budd Hopkins photo
Heather Brooke photo

“To be successful, a campaign to maintain the free internet and freedom of information has to go beyond vandal hackers. Stunts designed not to provoke dialogue or persuade the public of the rightness of the cause but simply to throw up a middle finger to authority are more hindrance than help.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/20/we-should-all-be-hactivists "We should all be hacktivists now", Column in the Guardian, 20 April 2012.
Attributed, In the Media

Joseph Alois Schumpeter photo
Henri Fantin-Latour photo
Dag Hammarskjöld photo
Bear Bryant photo

“There's a lot of blood, sweat and guts between dreams and success.”

Bear Bryant (1913–1983) American college football coach

Source: Top Fifty Quotes From Bear Bryant, Drew, Roberts, Aug. 7, 2012, 2015-12-17 http://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/2012/bear-bryant-50-quotes/,

Kurt Student photo
Henry David Thoreau photo

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

No known citation to Thoreau's works. First found, uncredited, in the 1940s in the variant "Success usually comes to those who are too busy to look for it", p. 711, Locomotive Engineers Journal, Volume 76, 1942. Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N6GZAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Success+usually+comes+to+those+who+are+too+busy%22&dq=%22Success+usually+comes+to+those+who+are+too+busy%22&lr=&as_drrb_is=b&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is=1900&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is=1980&as_brr=0
Misattributed

Henry Morgenthau, Sr. photo
Victor Davis Hanson photo
Alan Rusbridger photo
Tarkan photo
George William Curtis photo
Mihira Bhoja I photo
Harun Yahya photo
Geddy Lee photo

“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"

Vincent Van Gogh photo