Quotes About Challenge

There is nothing like competition. It teaches you early in life to win and lose, and, when you lose, to put your chin out instead of dropping it.

Was that life? Well then, once more!

Life did not present its sunny side to thee.

Thus Arm in Arm with thee I dare defy my century into the lists.

And I did not foresee how fundamentally challenged the view of the world in which I had been raised would be.

Writers transform: they throw a hand grenade into the notion of reality that people carry around in their heads. That's very dangerous, very destructive, but not to do it means you are satisfied with the status quo - and that's a kind of danger as well, because a kind of violence is already being perpetuated.

A tree didn't yield to his strength of will or daring, but only to the continual cutting of his ax.

You can't fight a battle you don't think exists.

throw caution to the wind, ignore the pleas of parents, coaches, spouses, and bosses to be 'realistic.' Realistic people do not accomplish extraordinary things...

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it. —PABLO PICASSO

We're heading into nut country today.

It was involuntary. They sank my boat.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. [Address at Rice University, September 12 1962]

It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me.

Come on! Who wants to fight me?

Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task.

Si dejaba de creer podía venirme abajo, perder el ritmo, regalar bases a los bateadores. Joder, sí, tenía dudas, pero las reprimía. Ya era bastante dura la vida de un pitcher para que encima tuviera que perder la fe en Dios.

The younger generation has been a force for change in part because it refuses to accept the status quo as a given. Young people are motivated by what the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky once called the 'energy of delusion.' If we knew the true magnitude of a task beforehand, we wouldn't undertake it in the first place. Thus, the older we get, and the more experience of challenge and failure that we endure, the less likely we are to attempt the impossible.

THE "GAMES" BEGIN

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.

My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now. (On steel industry executives who increased prices)