The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

No one knows what to say in the loser’s locker room.

Steve Jobs‘ ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.

When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

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

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated.

Some people take defeat and losses a certain way. You see how some fighters take losses.

He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.

The lies of the empire and the treason of the quislings shall be defeated.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

The ‚morality of compromise‘ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.

Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile to continue talking about peace and non-violence against a government whose only reply is savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people.

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

Losing is tough.

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism – mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets.

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs.

I played a great horse yesterday! It took seven horses to beat him.