Quotes About Failure

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honourable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth.

He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.

Isn't the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless and genocidal? Doesn't the height of a country's "success" usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?

We are all plagued by failures - by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber — a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could try it.

checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities. But

Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.

This experiment of making mortality a medical experience is just decades old. It is young. And the evidence is it is failing.

People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars.

In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it. Patients

When someone has come to you for your expertise and your expertise has failed, what do you have left? You have only your character to fall back upon—and sometimes it's only your pride that comes through.

As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture.

human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually.

Spending one's final days in an ICU because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said good-bye or "It's okay" or "I'm sorry" or "I love you.

by incorporating feedback from each success and each failure to improve their guesswork.

In most cases, it wasn't technology that failed. Rather, the physicians did not consider the correct diagnosis in the first place.

no matter how hard I tried, I was almost certain to make this error at least once in the course of my career.

Sometimes it turns out that we had missed a clue along the way, made a genuine mistake. Sometimes we turn out wrong despite doing everything right.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever. People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own—whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves. It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have. Yet our failures remain frequent. They persist despite remarkable individual ability. *

But somewhere along the way things started to go wrong.