The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

Of course, violence will not end with our combat mission. Extremists will continue to set off bombs, attack Iraqi civilians and try to spark sectarian strife. But ultimately, these terrorists will fail to achieve their goals.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if – the probable outcome is failure.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.

Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.

I’m hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

To not follow your passion in life is a recipe for failure and unhappiness.

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.

I’m a lad of the ’60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

Egos are never nice. I have been a victim of it a lot of times in my career. Whenever I have used it, I have failed.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.

I’m not going to get somewhere and say, ‚OK, I’m done.‘ Success is never final; I’ll just keep on going. The same way as failure never being fatal. Just keep going. I’m going to the stars and then past them.

We never fail when we try to do our duty, we always fail when we neglect to do it.

No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

No one is ever successful at everything that they do.

At places like Davos, people like to tell success stories. But their financial success has come with an unthinkable price tag. And on climate change, we have to acknowledge we have failed.

Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant – the digitalis of failure.

Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‚whiz kids‘ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.

If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure.

Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

Anytime we step out boldly to make changes, we take a chance that we might fail. But the only way to get better is to try.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.

The topic of leadership is a touchy one. A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord. Throughout my years, I haven’t had that fear.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won’t have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.