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.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

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

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.

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

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.

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.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

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.

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.

The fundamental question I believe is, ‚Is political Islam in our best interest?‘ If not, what is our policy to authoritatively support the countervailing forces?

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.

We will all fail in life, but nobody has to be a failure. Failing at a thing doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit trying.

We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.

You can’t be afraid to fail. It’s the only way you succeed – you’re not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

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

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.

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.

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.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.

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

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

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

The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

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

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

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

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

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

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.

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

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

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

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

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed.

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.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

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

I believe in the transformational power of liberty. I believe that the free Iraq is in this nation’s interests. I believe a free Afghanistan is in this nation’s interest.

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.

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

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try something.

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

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

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

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.

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.

A passionate belief in your business and personal objectives can make all the difference between success and failure. If you aren’t proud of what you’re doing, why should anybody else be?

With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

We need a president who will choose to do what’s best for the country, even when it doesn’t personally benefit them.