“There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan…. I'm the responsible officer of the Government.”

—  John F. Kennedy

State Department press conference (21 April 1961), following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, as quoted in A Thousand Days : John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965, 2002 edition), by Arthur Schlesinger, p. 262; also in The Quote Verifier (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 234 http://books.google.com/books?id=McO2Co4Ih98C&pg=PA234). The exact wording used by Kennedy (a hundred, not a thousand) had appeared in the 1951 film The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, as reported in Safire's New Political Dictionary (1993) by William Safire, pp 841–842). The earliest known occurrence is Galeazzo Ciano, Diary 1937-1943, entry for 9 September 1942 ("La victoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l'insuccesso."), but the earliest known occurrence on such a theme is in Tacitus's : Agricola Book 1 ab paragraph 27 http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/tac/ag01020.htm: “Iniquissima haec bellorum condicio est: prospera omnes sibi vindicant, adversa uni imputantur.” (It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.)
1961

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan…. I'm the responsible officer of the G…" by John F. Kennedy?
John F. Kennedy photo
John F. Kennedy 469
35th president of the United States of America 1917–1963

Related quotes

John F. Kennedy photo

“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
Galeazzo Ciano photo

“As always, victory will have a hundred fathers, but defeat will never be acknowledged by anyone at all.”

Galeazzo Ciano (1903–1944) Italian politician

Galeazzo Ciano (1946) The Ciano Diaries, 1939-1943. Milan: Rizzoli. p. 594; Original cited in: Emerging Infectious diseases. Vol 2, Nr 1, Jan.-March 1996. p. 61
Original: Come sempre, la vittoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l'insuccesso.

George Herbert photo

“404. One father is enough to governe one hundred sons, but not a hundred sons one father.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Józef Piłsudski photo

“To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat.”

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) Polish politician and Prime Minister

(Late 1920s or the 1930s) Zbigniew Brzezinski in his introduction to Wacław Jędrzejewicz’s Piłsudski: A Life For Poland. Quoted from this website http://members.lycos.co.uk/jozefpilsudski/index2.html
Attributed

Alison Goodman photo

“There was a saying that a man's true character was revealed in defeat. I thought it was also revealed in victory.”

Alison Goodman (1966) Australian science-fiction writer

Source: Eon: Dragoneye Reborn

John McCain photo

“My father was a career naval officer, as was his father. For hundreds of years, every generation of McCains has served the United States in uniform. My sons serve today, and I'm proud of them. My youngest served in the war that claimed Captain Khan's life as well as in Afghanistan. I want them to be proud of me. I want to do the right thing by them and their comrades.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2010s, 2016, Statement regarding the Khan family (1 August 2016)

“The basic function of the military — to achieve victory over the enemy — has been rendered obsolete by the fact that "victory" and defeat are almost certain to be achieved simultaneously.”

Robert L. Heilbroner (1919–2005) American historian and economist

Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter II, Part 1, The Impact of the Bomb, p. 64

Hans Frank photo

“You can't indict a government and its organizations as criminal. The conception of the Reich government is a hundred years old. The general staff is several hundreds of years old. The case of the SS is another matter, because it was started with the party and by the party. But it's quite impossible to indict or convict an organization as criminal if it has in its membership millions of innocent people.”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To Leon Goldensohn, July 20, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

John Steinbeck photo

“Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Source: The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

“No nation can prosper unless the men and women of whom it is composed apply to their own behaviour the same high standards of social morality as they demand of the officers of their government; for it is your fathers, your sons and your brothers—in a word, it is yourselves—who are responsible for the country's administration.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 6, p 114

Related topics