Quotes about achievement
page 13

Muhammad Qutb photo
Evelyn Underhill photo
Pierre-Simon Laplace photo
Dean Acheson photo
Margaret Thatcher photo

“Let's step back and think about the likely outcome of a scenario that involves the words "James Nicoll", "a box of sharp needles" and "possibly without ever having achieved full consciousness" for a moment, shall we?”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

LiveJournal comment http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/228255.html?thread=2188959#t2188959
2000s

John F. Kennedy photo

“Cicero bent Greek ideas to his vision of the idealized Roman Republic, and his understanding of the mores—the morality and social attachments—of the gentlemanly statesmen who would hold power in a just republic. Readers familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince will hear curious echoes of that work in Cicero’s advice; curious because the pieties of Cicero’s advice to the would-be statesman were satirized by Machiavelli sixteen hundred years later. If his philosophy was Greek and eclectic, Cicero owed his constitutional theory to Polybius; he was born soon after Polybius died, and read his history. And Cicero greatly admired Polybius’s friend and employer Scipio the Younger. There are obvious differences of tone. Polybius celebrated Rome’s achievement of equipoise, while Cicero lamented the ruin of the republic. Cicero’s account of republican politics veers between a “constitutional” emphasis on the way that good institutions allow a state to function by recruiting men of good but not superhuman character, and a “heroic” emphasis on the role of truly great men in reconstituting the state when it has come to ruin. Cicero’s vanity was so notorious that everyone knew he had himself in mind as this hero—had he not saved the republic before when he quelled the conspiracy of Catiline?”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 4 : Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero

Richard Stallman photo

“If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough — you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal. In other words, you need to be pragmatic.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

“The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively.”

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 10: Introduction

Tony Blair photo

“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth, and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted in "Socialism is So Hot Right Now" https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/socialism-hot-right-now/ (17 September 2018), by Jonah Goldberg, Commentary
1990s

Frances Kellor photo
Mahathir bin Mohamad photo

“What concerns me right now is that with the actions of Dr Mahathir, who is a lauded statesman and a beloved international icon, the country could become unstable, driving away foreign investors from this nation at the same time. As a former Prime Minister, he should be more understanding of what democracy is, which cannot be achieved the way Dr Mahathir is going about it now.”

Mahathir bin Mohamad (1925) Prime Minister of Malaysia

Malaysia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Anifah Aman said in a statement on Saturday (Mar 5) that he was both surprised and disappointed with Dr Mahathir, quoted on Channel News Asia, "Dr Mahathir movement will be bad for country: Malaysia Foreign Affairs Minister" http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/dr-mahathir-movement-will/2575782.html, March 5, 2016.

Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
Thomas Sowell photo
K. R. Narayanan photo
Tim Aker photo
Eric Hoffer photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Jean Baudrillard photo
David Lloyd George photo
Randy Pausch photo
Michael Hudson (economist) photo
Christopher Hitchens photo

“The poet is always concerned with achieving a balance between the inner and the outer world; it is his business to hold in a single thought reality and justice.”

Michael Roberts (writer) (1902–1948) English schoolteacher and man of letters

Two Alternatives? in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982

Paul Laurence Dunbar photo
Everett Dean Martin photo
Dawn Butler photo
Ahmad Sirhindi photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo
Damian Pettigrew photo
Alan Charles Kors photo
Gary L. Francione photo

“Awake! Arise! Go to the wise and gain knowledge! Realize the Self! Be of firm determination – fully concentrated – achieve your goal! (…)”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

Inspiration
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 17 August 1983.

Jan Smuts photo
Patrick Pearse photo
Edward Hopper photo
Iltutmish photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“What the world did not deem possible the German people have achieved…. It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy. After forty-five days this campaign in the West was equally and emphatically terminated.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

“Adolf Hitler’s Order of the Day Calling for Invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece,” Berlin, (April 6, 1941), New York Times, April 7, 1941
1940s

Alex Salmond photo

“Let us achieve great things for those who granted us the privilege to serve.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Scotland and Northern Ireland (June 18, 2007)

Vanna Bonta photo

“Poetry achieves its pinnacle when it is the perfection and mastery of expression (creation, perception) as Art (arrangement).”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

Charles Bernstein photo
Paul Gauguin photo

“I love Brittany; I find wildness and primitiveness there. When my wooden shoes ring on this granite, I hear the muffled, dull, and powerful tone which I try to achieve in painting.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 109: in a letter to a friend, c. 1886

Milton Friedman photo
Francis Parkman photo
Victor Klemperer photo
David Hilbert photo

“One of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity.”

David Hilbert (1862–1943) German prominent mathematician

On the Cantor set, as quoted in A World Without Time : The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein (2005) by Palle Yourgrau, p. 44

James Thurber photo

“Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

"The Case for Comedy", Lanterns & Lances http://books.google.com/books?id=m0RZAAAAYAAJ&q=%22humor+and+pathos+tears+and+laughter+are+in+the+highest+expression+of+human+character+and+achievement+inseparable%22&pg=PA143#v=onepage (1961); previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly November 1960 http://books.google.com/books?id=6q8GAQAAIAAJ&q=%22and+pathos+tears+and+laughter+are+in+the+highest+expression+of+human+character+and+achievement+inseparable%22&pg=PA98#v=onepage
From Lanterns and Lances‎

Bryan Caplan photo
Margaret Mead photo
Mohamed Nasheed photo
Charles Murray photo

“People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned -- it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned -- and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.”

Charles Murray (1943) American libertarian political scientist, author, and columnist

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/16997889.
Crown Forum (2012); ISBN10: 0307453421; ISBN13: 9780307453426.

James Branch Cabell photo
Frances Kellor photo
John Gray photo
Tawakkol Karman photo

“My aim for now is to lead a peaceful revolution to remove this regime. I think if I can be in the street with the people I can achieve more than if I am the president.”

Tawakkol Karman (1979) Yemeni journalist, politician, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient

2010s, Tawakul Karman, Yemeni activist, and thorn in the side of Saleh (2011)

Michael Bloomberg photo
David Prowse photo

“I mean it's wonderful to see that something you have done in your career has attracted so much attention. It was basically giving it what I call a lifetime achievement, it's something people will never forget.”

David Prowse (1935) English bodybuilder, weightlifter, and actor

Interview with David Prowse http://www.galaxiki.org/feature/darthvader.html (April 9, 2008)

Arnold Bennett photo
Gabriele Münter photo
F. W. de Klerk photo
John Gray photo
Prito Reza photo
James Branch Cabell photo
John Galsworthy photo

“Management as an activity has always existed to make people’s desires through organized effort. Management facilitates the efforts of people in organized groups and arises when people seek to cooperate to achieve goals.”

Arthur G. Bedeian (1946) American business theorist

Daniel A. Wren & Arthur G. Bedeian (1972: 11-12); as cited in: Le Texier, Thibault. "The first systematized uses of the term “management” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." Journal of Management History 19.2 (2013): 189-224.

Ibrahim of Ghazna photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
Jeffrey Montgomery photo
Mao Zedong photo

“If a man wants to succeed in his work, that is, to achieve the anticipated results, he must bring his ideas into correspondence with the laws of the objective external world; if they do not correspond, he will fail in his practice. After he fails, he draws his lessons, corrects his ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and can thus turn failure into success; this is what is meant by “failure is the mother of success” and “a fall into the pit, a gain in your wit.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 人们要想得到工作的胜利即得到预想的结果,一定要使自己的思想合于客观外界的规律性,如果不合,就会在实践中失败。人们经过失败之后,也就从失败取得教训,改正自己的思想使之适合于外界的规律性,人们就能变失败为胜利,所谓“失败者成功之母”,“吃一堑长一智”,就是这个道理。

Kazimir Malevich photo

“.. the art of futurism…. achieved great momentum in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century and remains a basic stimulus in the following forms of new art: Suprematism, Simultaneism, Purism, Odorism, Pankinetism, Tactilism, Haptism, Expressionism and Légerísm [referring to Fernand Léger in the last… ism, mentioned]”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

1910 - 1920
Source: 'Cubofuturism', Malevich, in Essays on Art, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 59

Clive Staples Lewis photo
Ken Binmore photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Noam Chomsky photo

“We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that "it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war". In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U. S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo "will know … how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved" in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk at the Englert Theatre in Iowa, April 10, 2006 http://www.greenteaphd.com/greenteablog/?p=252
Quotes 2000s, 2006

Mitt Romney photo

“Efforts that promote hard work and personal responsibility over government dependency make America strong. When the economy is growing and Americans are working, everyone involved has a shared sense of achievement, not to mention the basic sense of pride that comes with the paycheck they earn.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2012-09-19
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2012-09-18/Romney-47-recovery-dependency/57804214/1?fb_comment_id=fbc_417363074994653_4053230_417413701656257#f2c857185c
Column: Romney's answer to editorial
USA Today
2012

Alex Salmond photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Andrew Sullivan photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Democritus photo

“Men achieve tranquillity through moderation in pleasure and through the symmetry of life. Want and superfluity are apt to upset them and to cause great perturbations in the soul. The souls that are rent by violent conflicts are neither stable nor tranquil. One should therefore set his mind upon the things that are within his power, and be content with his opportunities, nor let his memory dwell very long on the envied and admired of men, nor idly sit and dream of them. Rather, he should contemplate the lives of those who suffer hardship, and vividly bring to mind their sufferings, so that your own present situation may appear to you important and to be envied, and so that it may no longer be your portion to suffer torture in your soul by your longing for more. For he who admires those who have, and whom other men deem blest of fortune, and who spends all his time idly dreaming of them, will be forced to be always contriving some new device because of his [insatiable] desire, until he ends by doing some desperate deed forbidden by the laws. And therefore one ought not to desire other men's blessings, and one ought not to envy those who have more, but rather, comparing his life with that of those who fare worse, and laying to heart their sufferings, deem himself blest of fortune in that he lives and fares so much better than they. Holding fast to this saying you will pass your life in greater tranquillity and will avert not a few of the plagues of life—envy and jealousy and bitterness of mind.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Jacob Bronowski photo
Aaron Copland photo