Quotes About Failure

If you want to avoid the usual fate in politics of failure, you need to understand some basic principles about why people make mistakes and how some people, institutions, and systems cope with mistakes and thereby perform much better than most.

Business as usual has been failing Bostonians since well before the pandemic, and COVID-19 has exposed and exacerbated deep inequities across our city.

Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought.

I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.

The most influential utopian idea of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism, Stalin's U.S.S.R. and Mao's China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias.

The utter incompetence of the U.N. is literally incomprehensible.

My great fear has always been complete and utter failure. Hence, you see, all the dispossessed people in my fiction, and why I try to earn as much money as I can. It's a defense. I don't enjoy it or do anything with it.

With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don't learn, then it's an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you're able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.

Trust me: Every entrepreneur has felt like an utter loser at some point.

To the extent that the academy is producing people who are talking utter nonsense, and imagining that it is sophisticated and enlightened - that system is a failure.

This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.

It's one thing to fail with something you utterly believe in, but to fail with something you don't believe in? You just feel so sordid.

After four tours of duty as a Navy SEAL officer, I came home from Iraq and watched the VA - the second-biggest bureaucracy in the country - fail my friends. The VA was broken and my friends were suffering. And yet, time and again, the only 'solution' I heard from liberals was to spend more money. It made me angry.

I don't relax. I can't take vacations. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I worry with every project that I'm going to fail. When it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it's a fantastic feeling, and I find it very hard to stop.

The President has once again failed us. Millions of Americans are at risk of going without the flu vaccine this year because the administration failed to act proactively to ensure an adequate supply. There is simply no excuse for this.

In global health, emergency vaccine stockpiles are like the insurance policy you never really wanted to take out: you resent the cost and have mixed feelings about never making a claim. Moreover, given that a stockpile is often a last resort, if you ever fall back on it, you have, in some way, already failed.

There are a lot of ways to be expressive in life, but I wasn't good at some of them. Music, for instance. I was a distinct failure with the cello. Eventually, my parents sold the cello and bought a vacuum cleaner. The sound in our home improved.

I always feel like a vague failure in L.A. - it always makes me feel like I should somehow be different than I am. And I don't know why.

Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. The Titanic saved lives because we're building bigger and bigger ships. So these people died, but we have effectively improved the safety of the system, and nothing failed in vain.

My cards and flowers always got rejected on Valentines Day.

At the October 1933 proceedings of the League of Nations in Madrid, Lemkin mounted a valiant effort to persuade the gathered ambassadors to define and agree to punish the crime of what we now call genocide. He failed.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.