Quotes from Colin Powell

Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude

Maybe we don't put our young people in situations often enough where they're allowed to fail. When you fail you gain experience, and with enough experience, you don't fail as often.

My own experience is that you get as much information as you can and then you pay attention to your intuition, to your informed instinct.

You need to learn what people have done, but you need to learn where they have failed... Usually when they fail it is in the execution.

Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

There are no secrets to success: don't waste time looking for them, success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty to those for whom you work and persistence.

Terrorism really flourishes in areas of poverty, despair and hopelessness, where people see no future

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.