Quotes About Failure

At the top of Charlie Ledley's list of concerns, after Cornwall Capital had laid its bets against subprime loans, was that the powers that be might step in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers. After

In Eisman's view, the unwillingness of the U.S. government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.

If you're in a business where you can do only one thing and it doesn't work out, it's hard for your bosses to be mad at you.

the unwillingness of the U.S. government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.

The people in a position to resolve the financial crisis were, of course, the very same people who had failed to foresee it:

When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.

When you go into the details of the cases, you see it's not bad people," he said. "It's bad systems. When the systems depend on human vigilance, they will fail.

You're going to make a mistake,' " said Carter. "The sin is making the same mistake twice. The best is to learn from other people's mistakes.

The accounting rules allowed them to assume the loans would be repaid, and not prematurely. This assumption became the engine of their doom.

The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos. "When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.

Expected utility theory wasn't exactly wrong. It simply did not understand itself, to the point where it could not defend itself against seeming contradictions. The theory's failure to explain people's decisions, Danny and Amos wrote, "merely demonstrates what should perhaps be obvious, that non-monetary consequences of decisions cannot be neglected, as they all too often are, in applications of utility theory.

Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence

People don't understand that a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

When the systems depend on human vigilance, they will fail.

a bungled transition becomes a bungled presidency.

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which

We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone. Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone. Not how to win, though winning was wonderful. Not even how to sacrifice. He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both.

People were soon saying how brave Messonnier had been to say that the virus could not be stopped. To Charity, her words sounded like the CDC letting itself off the hook for failing even to try.

We remember the Spartan ambassador who, being asked in whose name he had come, replied: 'In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own.' [See Plutarch, 'Lycurgus', Lives, tr. J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne (London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, nd [1898]), pp. 40–1:

The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent.

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure. You can argue, as some diehards will do, that the problem was one of faulty execution or you can accept that the underlying tenets of the ideology contained the seeds of the eventual disaster.

What the Soviet Union was to the ideology of Marxism, the Low-Fat Campaign is to the ideology of nutritionism—its supreme test and, as now is coming clear, its most abject failure.

Not failure, but low aim is sin.

Our country's got a sin problem, and I believe if these politicians in Washington would recognize the moral failure of so many of their policies that maybe we could fix it.