Indecision and delays are the parents of failure. George Canning
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. J K Rowling
Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing. J K Rowling
It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. Charles Kettering
Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets. Michael Korda
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows. George Eliot
The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures. Humphry Davy
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. Truman Capote
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. Jack Kerouac
Just because you fail once doesn't mean you’re gonna fail at everything. Marilyn Monroe
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. F Scott Fitzgerald
We are all failures – at least the best of us are. J M Barrie
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. Henry David Thoreau
If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried. Steven Wright
I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. John Keats
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. Napoleon Hill
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal. John Steinbeck
I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn’t matter – that would be my life. Jasper Johns
When I have tried and failed, I shall have failed. Sophocles, Antigone
Rather fail with honour than success with fraud. Sophocles
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible. William Faulkner
Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure. Jack Lemmon
So, I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be. John Wooden
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. Napoleon Hill
My reputation grows with every failure. George Bernard Shaw
Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures. Vincent van Gogh
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified: one is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction; another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. Noam Chomsky, Failed States audio
Terror: there is a straightforward single standard: their terror against us and our clients is the ultimate evil while our terror against them does not exist or if it does it is entirely appropriate. ibid.
Bush planners extended Clinton’s doctrine of control of space for military purposes to ownership of space which may mean instant engagement anywhere in the world. ibid.
The standard observation that the United States stood almost alone in rejecting the Kyoto protocols is correct only if the phrase United States excludes its population which strongly favours the Kyoto pact. ibid.
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company may even have succeeded in causing irreversible damage to Iraq’s oil fields. To support the invasion the fields are being driven to pump more than they should. ibid.
If the United States can maintain its control over Iraq which has the world’s second largest known oil reserves and is located at the heart of the world’s major energy supplies, it will enhance significantly Washington’s strategic power and critical leverage over its major rival in the tripolar world that has been taking shape for the past thirty years. ibid.
Among the most salient properties of failed states is that they do protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction, or that decision-makers regard such concerns as lower in priority than the short-term power and wealth of the state’s dominant sectors. Another characteristic of failed states is that they are outlaw states whose leaderships dismiss international law and treaties with contempt. Such instruments may be binding on others but not on the outlaw state. ibid.
An invisible network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the War on Terror began … Unknown numbers of suspects have been sent by rendition to countries where torture is virtually guaranteed. ibid.
Basic services deteriorated even more than they had under the sanctions: hospitals regularly ran out of the most basic medicines; the facilities are in horrid shape. ibid.
The Lancet study estimating 100,000 probable deaths by October 2004 elicited enough comment in England so that the government had to issue an embarrassing denial but in the United States virtual silence prevailed. ibid.
Halliburton the biggest recipient of Iraqi funds. ibid.
A viable non-proliferation regime depends crucially on the implementation of the obligation to disarm nuclear weapons as well as the obligation not to acquire them. ibid.
The logic of the annexation of Texas was essentially that attributed to Saddam Hussein when he conquered Kuwait. ibid.
[Adam] Smith held that the principle architects of global policy, our merchants and manufacturers, have sought to ensure their own interests are most peculiarly attended to however grievous the impacts on others. ibid.
The war on drugs also had an important domestic component much like the war on crime: it served to frighten the domestic population into obedience as domestic policies were being implemented to benefit extreme wealth at the expense of the large majority. ibid.
Failed states need not be weak. ibid.
Washington firmly supported Pinochet’s regime of violence and terror and had no slight role in its initial triumph. ibid.
The United States has the right to make them suffer by economic strangulation: Eisenhower approved economic sanctions in the expectation that if the Cuban people are hungry they will throw Castro out. Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fiden Castro’s departure as a result of the rising discomfort among hungry Cubans. Along with expanding the embargo Kennedy initiated a major terrorist campaign designed to bring the terrors of the Earth to Cuba. ibid.
The threat of democracy was not overcome until the 1965 Suharto coup and the huge slaughter that immediately followed establishing one of the most brutal regimes of the late twentieth century. There was no further concern about democracy or about awesome human rights violations and war crimes. Suharto remained ‘our kind of guy’ as the Clinton administration described him. ibid.
United States sought to block Iraqi democracy … The one thing every Iraqi agrees upon is that occupation should end soon which would be in direct conflict with the US objective of constructing a US-friendly democracy that would allow America to replace its military presence in Saudi Arabia with one in Iraq that would allow America to keep shaping the regional balance of power … Democracy would be welcomed as long as it is the traditional top-down kind. ibid.
71% of people rarely gets safe clean water; 47% never have enough electricity; 70% say their sewage system rarely works; and 40% of southern Iraqis are unemployed … 80% of Iraqis favoured near-term US troop withdrawal. ibid.