failure
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘failure’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama’s extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.” -David Limbaugh
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“So I try not to have any actual expectations for myself for any level of success or failure.” -Gavin DeGraw
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“A Failure in this Duty did once involve our Nation in all the Horrors of Rebellion and Civil War.” -Charles Inglis
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“Students rarely disappoint teachers who assure them in advance that they are doomed to failure.” -Sidney Hook
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“Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.” -Rosalind Russell
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“Washington, D.C. is what is broken, not the immigration policies. We have good laws. We have people suffer every day because of government’s failure to enforce the law and be respectful to the process we have. We have a pathway to citizenship already in place.” -Russell Pearce
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“The one phrase you can use is that success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan.” -Alan Price
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“One of the biggest problems with the modern feminist movement is its failure to bring men along with us.” -Tammy Bruce
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“The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again.” -Ben Stiller
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“No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.” -Greil Marcus
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“The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.” -Neal Boortz
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“The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain.” -Carroll Quigley
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“It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.” -Scott Ritter
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“I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure.” -Chen Shui-bian
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“That’s the conundrum of cartoon stripping, as opposed to political cartoons. When your anger is the driving force of your drawing hand, failure follows. The anger is OK, but it has to serve the interests of the heart, frankly.” -Berkeley Breathed
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“Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I’m a failure.” -William Hurt
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“We judged that a sudden, disorderly failure of Bear would have brought with it unpredictable but severe consequences for the functioning of the broader financial system and the broader economy, with lower equity prices, further downward pressure on home values, and less access to credit for companies and households.” -Timothy Geithner
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“Failure is unfortunately as common as success.” -Sanjay Kumar
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“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” -Donn Pearce
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“You must not demand the failure of your peers, because the more good things that are around in film, in television, in theater – why the better it is for all of us.” -Jerome Lawrence
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“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” -Seth Godin
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“I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.” -Jeremy Irons
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“I’m very comfortable with failure. I’m very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.” -Steven Soderbergh
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“As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.” -Jimmy Carr
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“Philanthropic colonization is a failure. National colonization will succeed.” -Theodor Herzl
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“I don’t need to be looking at every failure of government, I need to be looking where failure of government needs reform.” -Darrell Issa
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“I think it’s one of the main negative emotional ingredients that fuels show business, because there’s so much at stake and the fear of failure looms large.” -Garry Shandling
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“This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can’t be happy as a success, it’s very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.” -Michael Korda
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“Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.” -Gary Ryan Blair
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“When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.” -William Kingdon Clifford
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“The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you’ve got playing the leads.” -Steven Moffat
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“In God’s world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.” -Frederick William Robertson
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“Every book I’ve written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.” -Yann Martel
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“We feel a lot of pressure about looking silly or appearing weak, whatever that means, or being a failure. You have to keep in your head: what’s the worst that can happen?” -Michael Fassbender
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“I’m living life as best I can – but I’m not exempt from failure and making bad choices.” -LeAnn Rimes
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“Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.” -Alastair Campbell
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“There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.” -Elliot Richardson
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“I think I’ve failed every test I’ve ever taken. If there was a failure I would have been it.” -Lisa Marie Presley
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“It’s not a very high failure rate if you choose people that you really like the sound of.” -Bryan Ferry
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“The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote.” -Carol Moseley Braun
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“It’s how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success.” -Charlotte Whitton
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“It’s not about failure it’s about trying something and risking something for attaining your goal.” -Carol Alt
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“Definitely, it’s a fear of failure that drives me.” -Jerry Bruckheimer
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“The great thing about baseball is the causality is easy to determine and it always falls on the shoulders of one person. So there is absolute responsibility. That’s why baseball is psychologically the cruelest sport and why it really requires psychological resources to play baseball – because you have to learn to live with failure.”…
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“Americans, who make more of marrying for love than any other people, also break up more of their marriages, but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination of people not to live without it.” -Morton Hunt
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“Schools don’t really allow failure and yet it’s a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.” -Roddy Doyle
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“Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.” -Guy Kawasaki
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“Sadness is a super important thing not to be ashamed about but to include in our lives. One of the bigger problems with sadness or depression is there’s so much shame around it. If you have it you’re a failure. You are felt as being very unattractive.” -Mike Mills
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“We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.” -John B. S. Haldane
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“The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.” -Elias Canetti
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“All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.” -Alberto Giacometti
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“As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.” -Albert J. Nock
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“But if you have a solid walk with the Lord, then you won’t fear that failure.” -Cliff Richard
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“When you’re fearless, you take more risks because you’re less conscious of failure or what can go wrong.” -Brett Ratner
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“Success is not forever and failure isn’t fatal.” -Don Shula
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“I find fault with my children because I like them and I want them to go places – uprightness and strength and courage and civil respect and anything that affects the probabilities of failure on the part of those that are closest to me, that concerns me – I find fault.” -Branch Rickey
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“I hate how box-office failures are blamed on an actress, yet I don’t see a box-office failure blamed on men.” -Ellen Page
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“As efforts to fix this failure at the Veterans Administration continue, I also intend to persist in demanding answers and action on the establishment of a new clinic to serve the veterans in North Central Washington.” -Doc Hastings
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“How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.” -Harold Ramis
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“I think everyone shares a fear of failure – that you’re only as good as your most recent collection. That’s definitely a fear, but it’s a fear that fuels me, that makes me want to work harder, that makes me take on more challenges.” -Alexander Wang
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“Is anarchism possible? The failure of attempts to attain freedom does not mean the cause is lost.” -Johann Most
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“I have always believed that it’s important to show a new look periodically. Predictability can lead to failure.” -T. Boone Pickens
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“My films seem to be about men’s struggle with failure.” -Tom Hooper
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“I don’t want to feel like a failure to my daughter. She’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Buffy – pretty great and all, but Charlotte’s way better.” -Sarah Michelle Gellar
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“I’m not scared of anything in particular, but I am motivated by a fear of failure as opposed to a need to succeed.” -Heston Blumenthal
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“I failed first grade, which is my biggest problem. You always feel like a failure, like you’re stupid.” -Amy Sedaris
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“My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It’s about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.” -Wynonna Judd
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“Failure is the most terrible thing in our business. When we fail, the whole world knows about it.” -Desi Arnaz
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“Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.” -Kenneth L. Pike
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“Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries’ failure to advance.” -John McCarthy
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“I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.” -Amy Tan
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“In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.” -Walter Pater
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“Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.” -Eric Ries
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“There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.” -Brian Ferneyhough
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“None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind witness what’s going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.” -Morris West
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“People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don’t want to know nothing about you!” -Don Johnson
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“If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.” -Jerry Falwell
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“War is something Arafat sends others to do for him. That is, the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent caused the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Clinton’s mediation.” -Oriana Fallaci
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“The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.” -Karl Liebknecht
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“Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.” -Edsger Dijkstra
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“Attempt something so impossible that unless God is in it, it’s doomed to failure.” -John Haggai
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“In tennis, it is not the opponent you fear, it is the failure itself, knowing how near you were but just out of reach.” -Andy Murray
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“I don’t think there’s any way it could have failed. We don’t know failure in this band. We didn’t know failure. We got to know it a little after awhile but at that time there was no such word.” -Roger Daltrey
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“Unwillingness to risk failure is always there, but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose.” -Demi Moore
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“Admitting failure is quite cleansing, but never – pleasurable.” -Michael Morpurgo
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“If you’re 40 years old and you’ve never had a failure, you’ve been deprived.” -Gloria Swanson
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“Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.” -Mark Skousen
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“Once you can accept failure, you can have fun and success.” -Rickey Henderson
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“One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they’re a lead. I think that’s a recipe for failure, actually, because if they become unsympathetic, you lose your audience.” -Melissa Rosenberg
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“The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain, without a thought being given to the real strong hold.” -Edward Bach
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“You shouldn’t be afraid of failure – when something fails, you think, ‘What did I learn from that experience? I can do better next time.’ Then kill that project and move on to the next. Don’t get disappointed.” -Niklas Zennstrom
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“I’m fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I’ve wired myself for failure.” -Ron Perlman
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“Before I was married, I didn’t consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn’t do ‘do-it-yourself.’ When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he…
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“We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.” -Mira Sorvino
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“I don’t have a fear factor. Well, not much of one. And I’m willing to risk quite a lot – as a comedian, you’re always risking a lot. You’re risking failure, especially if you’re improvising and going on TV shows trying to make comedy out of thin air. That is quite a risky business.” -David…
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“We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvelous. It’s fertiliser, it’s like living fertiliser, because you’re forced on yourself.” -Rupert Everett
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“I’m kind of a failure. I mean, I’ll be honest. I’m successful in that I’m getting to work on great stuff, but I think I’m a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.” -Paul Feig
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“I get asked, ‘How can you have such failures in your films?’ Well, what else is life about? There’s some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.” -Alexander Payne
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“Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.” -Jeff Goodell
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“The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.” -Chris Hedges
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“The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.” -Ben Okri
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“Divorce is so common and accepted in America that beating myself up over it may sound ridiculous. But I was raised to believe that divorce wasn’t an option to me, divorce equaled failure. I wasn’t able to change that equation until I found myself in the right relationship.” -Trisha Yearwood
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“America traditionally represents the greatest possibility of someone’s going from nothing to something. Why? In theory, if not practice, the government stays out of the way and lets individuals take risks and reap rewards or accept the consequences of failure. We call this capitalism – or, at least, we used to.” -Larry Elder
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“We’re born with success. It is only others who point out our failures, and what they attribute to us as failure.” -Whoopi Goldberg
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“There’s something to be said for failing. It’s not the failure you feel, it’s the failure that people project when something disappoints. You’re back to ground zero, where there’s no expectations, and that’s where I like to be.” -Kevin Smith
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“The biggest problem in my life is trying to be the kind of man that I want to be, the father that I want to be, and how to process the failure of my marriage.” -Ethan Hawke
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“I assume everything I do in life is gonna be a failure, and then if it turns up roses, then I’m psyched.” -Jonah Hill
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“I was convicted of three misdemeanors of willful failure to file a form.” -Wesley Snipes
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“I failed the LSAT. Basically, if I had not failed, I’d have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life’s way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating.” -Sara…
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“The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.” -B. C. Forbes
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“Nixon’s grand mistake was his failure to understand that Americans are forgiving, and if he had admitted error early and apologized to the country, he would have escaped.” -Bob Woodward
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“Even when you have doubts, take that step. Take chances. Mistakes are never a failure – they can be turned into wisdom.” -Cat Cora
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“If you try to do your best there is no failure.” -Mike Farrell
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“What is more comforting to the terrorists around the world: the failure to pass the 9/11 legislation because we lacked ‘a majority of the majority,’ or putting aside partisan politics to enact tough new legislation with America’s security foremost in mind?” -Rahm Emanuel
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“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.” -Allan Bloom
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“My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town, it was only busy four and half, five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.” -Mickey Gilley
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“I was never afraid of failure after that because, I think, coming that close to death you get kissed. With the years, the actual experience of course fades, but the flavor of it doesn’t. I just had a real sense of what choice do I have but to live fully?” -Debra Winger
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“It’s not that we fly by the seat of our pants. We’re not afraid of failure.” -Craig Ferguson
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“I find writing very difficult. It’s hard and it hurts sometimes, and it’s scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.” -Tony Kushner
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“I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.” -Jean Kerr
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“My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.” -Dean Kamen
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“Some people will go to the opening of an envelope. They live their lives in the public eye and get off on it, they need it. They need that kind of adoration. If their name isn’t in the tabloids once a week they feel like a failure.” -Jensen Ackles
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“Coming to terms with the fact that my marriage was a failure was devastating and very difficult.” -Sarah McLachlan
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“I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.” -Dave Matthews
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“So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.” -John Drinkwater
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“Even as far back as when I started acting at 14, I know I’ve never considered failure.” -Jennifer Lawrence
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“Well, I think it’s too early to call Fallujah a failure.” -Charles Schumer
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“There’s a difference between a failure and a fiasco… a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.” -Orlando Bloom
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“It’s probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it’s a failure.” -James Taylor
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“If you’ve gone into a marriage and you haven’t been clear about how you’re going to handle money, how you want to raise kids, who is going to work or stay home or what have you, then you’ve set yourself up for failure.” -Phil McGraw
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“You can’t have any successes unless you can accept failure.” -George Cukor
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“Failure doesn’t kill you… it increases your desire to make something happen.” -Kevin Costner
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“The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.” -Nigel Farage
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“Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.” -Lillian Hellman
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“You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism.” -Alexander Haig
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“Hollywood… a city I was to come back to time and again, in sickness and in health, in success and in failure, with anticipation and with dread.” -Dirk Benedict
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“I’ve had a lot of success I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.” -Gordon Ramsay
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“The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.” -Earl Warren
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“Rather than viewing a brief relapse back to inactivity as a failure, treat it as a challenge and try to get back on track as soon as possible.” -Jimmy Connors
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“If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.” -Bryan Cranston
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“Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.” -Gifford Pinchot
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“Civilization is a failure. We need to think what we can do together in love and peace.” -Serj Tankian
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“Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.” -James Dyson
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“I’ve tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we’ll win again, but I’ve also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.” -Mike Krzyzewski
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“Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.” -Jack Lemmon
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“You’ll never convince me there is a hopeless situation or there is any finality in any success or any failure.” -Carlos Ghosn
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“You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it’s not a natural drive – it’s born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.” -Gabrielle Union
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“With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama looks suspiciously like President Bush, a man on a quest for American Empire.” -Justin Sane
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“Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.” -Graham Greene
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“Success needs no explanation. Failure does not have one that matters.” -Jesse Jackson
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“Fear of failure has always been my best motivator.” -Douglas Wood
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“It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one to make it a failure.” -Herbert Samuel
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“I may be a successful football player, but I feel like such a failure.” -Brett Favre
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“If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn’t work, you’re a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn’t sound great to me!” -Betty White
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“I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.” -Trent Reznor
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“Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.” -William Howard Taft
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“At first I wasn’t sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.” -Gordon Parks
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“The mere thought of divorce terrified me. To me, divorce symbolized failure.” -Annette Funicello
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“By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.” -Jonathan Kozol
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“I’m sure not afraid of success and I’ve learned not to be afraid of failure. The only thing I’m afraid of now is of being someone I don’t like much.” -Anna Quindlen
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“To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.” -Irving Babbitt
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“The failure of the White House and Congress to seriously address the nation’s fiscal situation is certain to broaden the belief among many voters that the U.S. political system is broken.” -Ron Fournier
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“I mean, I love L.A. – I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It’s a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don’t do that every time, then you’re considered a failure.” -Kristen Stewart
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“As long as the G.O.P., led by its increasingly visible women, continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women’s failure to understand their own lives and interests, the gender gap won’t go away.” -Dee Dee Myers
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“Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.” -Charles Horton Cooley
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“Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.” -Victor Kiam
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“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.” -Benjamin Carson
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“The traditional religious right’s failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.” -Jon Meacham
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“And in reality, I don’t think it’s a real documentary. It’s more a story of her life. It’s a story of survival. It’s a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.” -Maximilian Schell
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“The failure of world leaders to act on the critical issue of global warming is often blamed on economic considerations.” -David Suzuki
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