Quotes about fail (2555 quotes, page 26)

“I know that I can give you examples of failed Socialist economies until I'm blue in the face and you won't care. Because of course Socialism is inherently more moral, more altruistic than the evil, greedy, capitalist warmongering seen in the West.”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

to be sorted

Evil

“When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide. Or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.”

Henry Miller book Nexus

Source: The Rosy Crucifixion III: Nexus (1960), Ch. 3, p. 36

Suicide

“Climate change is already... costing our nations trillions of dollars and we know that none of us can escape the worse that’s yet to come if we fail to seize this moment.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2021, November 2021, US President's Statement on Day 2 of the 2021 UN Climate Conference

Change

“Our investment in prevention and research is an investment in our nations … it all depends on healthy people, the result of our knowledge must be prevention. If we trust treatment without an investment in prevention, then we have failed.”

Kirk R. Smith (1947–2020) American climatologist

Source: https://clusterbcs.com/en/in-memoriam-kirk-r-smith-1947-2020-2/

Dependency , People , Knowledge

“I don't think any drug that can cause brain damage, failing kidneys, hardening arteries, pain, and suffering should be made available. Drugs are not the way to the light. They won't lead to a fairy-tale life, they lead to suffering.”

Layne Staley (1967–2002) American singer

Source: Pandemonium Magazine, Vol#29 - April 1995: "Layne Staley Unchained"

Pain , Light , Suffering , Thinking

“I was stuck in their cycle of poverty under their failed policies and I busted out, and glory to God, I am never going back and taking the same message of freedom to everybody.”

Lauren Boebert (1986) American politician

Source: Lauren Boebert: 2020 Election Is a Choice Between ‘Freedom’ and ‘Government Control’ https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/08/14/lauren-boebert-2020-election-is-choice-between-freedom-government-control/ (14 August 2020)

God , Freedom

“I have failed, made mistakes, trusted, and had my lows and highs. But today, I stand firm, stronger than ever and living my best life.”

Chika Ike (1985) Nigerian actress

Source: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/12/chika-ike-tumultuous-journey-of-a-screen-diva/ During an interview about herself( December 28 2019)

Life

“After creating the “political class,” journalists failed to set parameters for person in that class.”

Grace Alele-Williams (1932–2022) mathematician

Source: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/03/journalists-not-evaluating-politicians-alele-williams/ Speaking at a meeting organised by Initiative for Moral Rectitude in Society (IMRS).

Personality

“The beauty of worldly allurements makes it lovers so much oblivious that they forget the passage of temporal as well as celestial worlds. They fail to understand the challenge before them.”

Bu Ali Shah Qalandar (1209–1324) Indian Sufi saint

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 270

Understanding , Forgetting , Beauty , Lovers

“It was a good plan, and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life.”

Ben Aaronovitch book Whispers Under Ground

Source: Whispers Under Ground (2012), Chapter 25, “Ladbroke Grove” (p. 262)

Time , Life

“Running counter to the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation and Taiwan compatriots, Taiwan separatists’ attempts to seek ‘Taiwan independence’ are doomed to fail.”

Zhu Fenglian (1977)

Source: "Mainland Condemns ‘Taiwan Independence’ Separatist Schemes" in China Today http://www.chinatoday.com.cn/ctenglish/2018/zdtj/202006/t20200612_800209787.html (12 June 2020)

“Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: 1920s, My Life and Work (1922), pp. 19–20. Quoted in Samuel Crowther, "Henry Ford's Problem," The Magazine of Business, vol. 52 (1927), p. 182

Fear , Intelligence , Failure

“I have lived my whole life on the stage and screen before you. I found purpose and meaning in your response. For an actor that is no greater loss than the loss of his audience. I can part the Red Sea, but I can't part with you, which is why I won't exclude you from this stage in my life.
For now, I'm not changing anything. I will insist on work when I can; the doctors will insist on rest when I must. If you see a little less spring in my step, if your name fails to leap to my lips, you will know why. And if I tell you a funny story for the second time, please laugh anyway.”

Charlton Heston (1923–2008) American actor

Winning the Cultural War (1999), Video farewell (2002)

Spring , Sea , Life , Change

“Nature never "fails."”

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

Nature complies with its own laws. Nature is the law. When Man lacks understanding of Nature's laws and a Man-contrived structure buckles unexpectedly, it does not fail. It only demonstrates that Man did not understand Nature's laws and behaviors. Nothing failed. Man's knowledge or estimating was inadequate.
In "How Little I Know", in Saturday Review (12 Nov 1966), 152. Excerpted in Buckminster Fuller and Answar Dil, Humans in Universe (1983), 31.
1960s

Nature

“If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

“Businesses that fail to change die, while their men move on. Militaries that fail to change move on, while their men die.”

Brig. Gen. Eran Ortal (1971)

Source: {DCJ 16, July 2018}

Men , Business , Change

“So the written Constitution, the one we can see, fails to tell us just what's in it and what's not.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

The Invisible Constitution (2008), Identifying "The Constitution"

“The spatial web holds so much promise for improving our lives that those companies failing to invest and embrace the future will go the way of Kodak, Radio Shack, and Blockbuster.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

Future , Way

“If Great Britain lost her Empire and India and her share in world trade and her sea power, she would be like a vast whale stranded in one your Scottish bays, which swam in upon the tide and then was left to choke and rot upon the sands. We should be like a great shop emporium in a district from which prosperity has for ever departed. We least of all peoples and races can afford to fail. Failure to us does not mean merely that we shall not improve. It means that we shall be ruined and frozen out.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: Rectorial address ("The present decline of Parliamentary government in Great Britain") to Edinburgh University (5 March 1931), quoted in The Times (6 March 1931), p. 19

Sea , Failure , People , World

“It is better as it is: I have failed but I can sleep;
Though the pit I now am in is very dark and deep
I can walk to-morrow's streets and can meet to-morrow's men
Unashamed to face their gaze as I go to work again.I have lost the hope I had; in the dust are all my dreams,
But my loss is not so great or so dreadful as it seems;
I made my fight and though I failed I need not slink away
For I do not have to fear what another man may say.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: When Day is Done (1921), The Loss Is Not So Great, stanzas 1 and 2.

Sleep , Fear , Loss , Dreams

“People predict by making up stories.
People predict very little and explain everything.
People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not.
People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough.
People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts.
The handwriting was on the wall. It was just the ink that was invisible.
People often work hard to obtain information they already have and avoid new knowledge.
Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe. In this match, surprises are expected.
Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable.
A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.
The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small.
So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative
The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

Amos Tversky (1937–1996) Israeli psychologist

Source: Notes made by Tversky for a scientific paper, c.1972. Michael Lewis. "The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World". Penguin, 2016 (ISBN 9780141983035).

Knowledge , Problem , Thinking , People

“Nothing is more devastating than a life without liberty. A life in which one can be forced into parenthood is just such a life. Rape is among the most profound denials of liberty, and compelling a woman to bear a rapist's child is an assault on her humanity. How different is it to force her to remain pregnant... because efforts at birth control accidentally failed?”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

Source: Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (1990), Approaching Abortion Anew

Birth , Life , Effort

“In trying to work for you, we might have failed to take good care of your souls as expected. We ask for your forgiveness in this Year of Mercy. We ask a bit a bit of amnesty from you. We should humbly acknowledge before God and his people the fact that in the history of our priesthood, the dark presence of sin is also found, so there is the need for us in this Year of Mercy to commit ourselves fully to the search for holiness.”

Robert Ndlovu (1955) Archbishop of Harare

Source: Archbishop of Harare celebrates Chrism Mass http://www.archivioradiovaticana.va/storico/2016/03/24/archbishop_of_harare_celebrates_chrism_mass/en-1217797 (24 March 2016)

Soul , God , History , Search

“[T]he main work of life lies in carrying on worthily the great common task of civilization: to play one's due part in the enterprise of feeding some hundreds of millions of men, in seeing that they are protected against violence and fraud, that they have access to justice, and as far as may be to education, that they have some freedom to pursue life and happiness, and are not cut off altogether from the wonders and beauties of the world and the mind of man. To succeed in doing this is civilization: to fail is the defeat of civilization. For civilization is, ultimately, the process whereby a human society in search, as Aristotle puts it, of a "good life for man", gradually overcomes the obstacles, material and other, that stand in its way and makes man increasingly master of his environment.”

Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) Anglo-Australian scholar

1920s, The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League and the Future (1929)
Source: "Peace and Strife as Elements in Life: The Ideal of “Unhindered Activity”", pp. 37-38

Search , Fraud , Life , Men

“There's perfect harmony
In the rising and the falling of the sea.
And as we sail along,
I never fail to be astounded by
The things we'll do for promises
And a song.”

Ronnie James Dio (1942–2010) American singer

"All the Fools Sailed Away" on Dream Evil (1987)
Lyrics

Perfection , Sea

“That party will go down to all time as the party that failed Australia in her hour of need.”

Billy Hughes (1862–1952) Australian politician, seventh prime minister of Australia

Source: Regarding the Australian Labor Party, as quoted in a speech https://electionspeeches.moadoph.gov.au/speeches/1917-billy-hughes during the 1917 federal election campaign (27 March 1917)

Time

“They said I was going to fail because of difficulty. They didn't know I am made exactly for that.”

- Goa

“Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I've learned in my own life. The best subjects are always people, who never fail to amaze me by their unpredictability.”

Ronnie James Dio (1942–2010) American singer

Speaking on his plans for the Dio album Master of the Moon, interview https://ronniejamesdiosite.com/NewsInterviews/Interviews/metalmastersJAN04/MMjan04RJD.html, Metal Masters, January 2004

Imagination , People , Learning , Life

“There is no doubt missionary work is not easy and it faces no few problems and challenges, old and new. But one this is certain: if the Lord calls us to such a demanding task it is because He will not fail to supply us with the means to achieve it.”

Crescenzio Sepe (1943) Italian Catholic cardinal

Problem

“Finehouse relaxed in his own seat. They had all certainly failed.
But maybe sometimes, he thought, it’s a good thing, on the whole, to have closed a knife that someone else had opened.”

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

Epilogue, “I Have No Idea” (p. 284)
Stolen Skies (2022)

“Well-designed security systems fail gracefully.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

Airport Security Failure, Schneier, Bruce, 2006-03-14, Schneier on Security, 2022-06-31 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/airport_securit_2.html,
Human perception of reality, risk and terrorism

“Don't forget: our media culture failed to serve the public interest by missing (with a few honourable exceptions) the two biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the Iraq war and the financial meltdown. We've had far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies.”

Arianna Huffington (1950) Greek-American author and syndicated columnist

"The paywall is history" The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/may/11/newspapers-web-media-pay-wall 11 May, 2009

War , Time , Forgetting

“The common error lies in failing to recognize that apparent trends can be generated as by-products, or side consequences, of expansions and contractions in the amount of variation within a system, and not by anything directly moving anywhere.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Full House (1996), Chapter 3, “Different Parsings, Different Images of Trends” (p. 33)

Error

“Happiness simply is someone who truly remains beside you whether you succeed or fail.”

Kazeronnie Mak

Happiness

“Because we are so accustomed to talking about race in terms of black and white, we often fail to recognize and contest expressions of racism that target people of color who are not black.”

Angela Davis Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), Chapter Two

People , Color

“The thing about the greased piglet is that he manages to slip through other people’s hands where mere mortals fail.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

'Greased piglet' Boris Johnson could pass deal says David Cameron https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/17/greased-piglet-boris-johnson-could-pass-deal-says-david-cameron Guardian (17 October 2019}
2010s, 2019

People

“Responsibility is a must; if you fail to be responsible, you are still responsible for your failure.”

Yusuf Cornelius Otijenu

Failure

“I was a shit when I met you. I still am in lots of ways. But because of you I've had to give up trying to be a dedicated, full-time shit. I couldn't make it, hadn't the strength of character. Which is a pity in a way, because when you fall back into the ranks of the failed shits or amateur shits or incidental shits you start taking on responsibility for other people.”

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) English novelist, poet, critic, teacher

Ronnie Appleyard to Simon (Simona) Quick in Ch. 4, p. 254
I Want It Now (1968)

People , Time , Way

“(NOT ENOUGH) " Let your Success do the talking. " ( what ifi fail at the process ) ENGR. ABAN SULE”

Engr.Abah Sule

Success

“NOT ENOUGH " Let your Success do the talking. " ( what ifi fail at the process ) ENGR. ABAN SULE”