logo

Quotes About Defeat

Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.
~ William Faulkner
because it takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing
~ William Faulkner
But that competitor was Death, and Roger Shumann lost.
~ William Faulkner
completely over. For an instant it resists
~ William Faulkner
Defeats, humiliations- craven avoidance- burn into memory so much more deeply than their opposites.
~ William Finnegan
Fuck it. Just fuck it.
~ William Gibson
See? Fezzik pointed then. Far down, at the very bottom of the mountain path, the man in black could be seen running. Inigo is beaten. Inconceivable! exploded the Sicilian. Fezzik never dared disagree with the hunchback. I'm so stupid, Fezzik nodded. Inigo has not lost to the man in black, he has defeated him. And to prove it he has put on all the man in black's clothes and masks and hoods and boots and gained eighty pounds.
~ William Goldman
Surrender, the Prince said. It will not happen. SURRENDER! the Prince shouted. DEATH FIRST!
~ William Goldman
I'm a dead cookie.
~ William Goldman
The man in black retreated before the slashing of the great sword. He tried to sidestep, tried to parry, tried to somehow escape the doom that was now inevitable. But there was no way. He could block fifty thrusts; the fifty-first flicked through, and now his left arm was bleeding. He could thwart thirty ripostes, but not the thirty-first, and now his shoulder bled. The
~ William Goldman
Who kills Prince Humperdinck? At the end, somebody's got to get him. Is it Fezzik? Who?' 'Nobody kills him. He lives.' 'You mean he wins, Daddy? Jesus, what did you read me this thing for?
~ William Goldman
Teddy Roosevelt said that "far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat
~ William J. Bennett
I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49 No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written.
~ William L. Shirer
Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler.
~ William L. Shirer
In 1918, after the last defeat, the Kaiser had fled, the monarchy had tumbled, but the other traditional institutions supporting the State had remained, a government chosen by the people had continued to function, as did the nucleus of a German Army and a General Staff. But in the spring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist.
~ William L. Shirer
He could bear even less the disaster which befell his beloved Fatherland in November 1918. To him, as to almost all Germans, it was "monstrous" and undeserved. The German Army had not been defeated in the field. It had been stabbed in the back by the traitors at home.
~ William L. Shirer
They and the Army leaders, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, had pushed political power into the hands of the reluctant Social Democrats. In doing so they managed also to place on the shoulders of these democratic working-class leaders apparent responsibility for signing the surrender and ultimately the peace treaty, thus laying on them the blame for Germany's defeat and for whatever suffering a lost war and a dictated peace might bring upon the German people.
~ William L. Shirer
terrorism could not win once the real terror went.
~ China Mieville
I admit defeat. I've been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don't know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn't pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn't a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn't want to be what I want to make it.
~ China Mieville
A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.
~ China Mieville
He who wants to do more than he is able must admit defeat or retire.
~ Chrétien de Troyes
It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.
~ Chris Cleave
Then I'm tempted to die just to … spite him." "That's the spirit that will win us the war.
~ Chris Cleave
Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.
~ Chris Crutcher