“People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. When they believe in themselves they have the first secret of success.”
Positive Thinking Every Day : An Inspiration for Each Day of the Year (1993), "April 13"
Earlier variant: People become really quite remarkable when they start thinking that they can do things. And those who have learned to have a realistic, nonegotistical belief in themselves, who possess a deep and sound self-confidence, are assets to mankind, too, for they transmit their dynamic quality to those lacking it.
You Can If You Think You Can (1987), p. 84
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Norman Vincent Peale 63
American writer 1898–1993Related quotes
“It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.”
Source: Nothing by Chance
Speech in the European Parliament, 9 May 2012. Farage: We face the prospect of mass civil unrest, even revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ6_Ey_MJV4&list=PL25613E6F90B320EC&index=14&feature=plpp_video
2012
Source: What Got You Here Won't Get You There, 2008, p. 72 (in 2010 edition)
Rectorial address delivered at St. Andrews University, 3 November 1926. Translated in [Nansen, Fridtjof, Adventure, and other papers, https://books.google.com/books?id=G6snAQAAMAAJ, 1927, Books for Libraries Press, 27]
Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 397)
The Steel Tsar (1981)
“One thing I do understand is that people get scared when I start thinking out loud.”
[20031212010945.GB29594@wall.org, 2003]
Usenet postings, 2003
For example, if you ask the question, “In what cities do Blacks live under the worst conditions—in terms of crime, rotten education, poor services,”—these are the very cities that have been run for decades by Democrats. I don’t care whether you are talking about Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, or Detroit, it’s all been Democrats. And then on top of it, it’s been Black Democrats! That is, again, if you look at where Blacks live under the most horrible conditions, its in cities where a Black is the mayor, a Black is the chief of police and a Black is the superintendent of schools.
"An Interview with Dr. Walter E. Williams" in Free Market Mojo (20 November 2009) http://freemarketmojo.com/?p=4699
2000s
The Day the Universe Changed (1985), 1 - The Way We Are
Context: If something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual, and then starts to involve really large numbers of people, that's when the ritual becomes something else. It becomes widespread enough to affect the general agreement we all share. So, that's when the responsibility for running it goes out of your hands to be taken over by the institutions set up to run the rituals that matter on a regular basis, so that people can have clear rules and regulations to follow if they decide to get up to that particular ritual. The institutions take the admin out of daily life and run it for you: banking, government, sewage, tax collecting. Or, if you break the rules and regulations, one institution can take you out of daily life. This one: (James Burke displays a trial.) In every community, the law -- whether it's dressed up like this or the village elders telling you what the local custom is -- the law is all those rules I was on about earlier. I suppose what institutions like this do, most of all, is the dirty work. While they're putting them away here in the law court, for instance, that leaves us free to get on with making money, having a career, and avoiding the social responsibilities that these people have to deal with. And after a few centuries of this buck-passing, the institutions get big and powerful, and reach into everybody's lives so much they become hard to alter and virtually impossible to get rid of.