Quotes
And yet in a way I would rather fail point blank. Things one can do have no value. I don't mind feeling small myself, but I dread finding the world is.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
I am made, crudely, for success.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained.
It is not the rich man's son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race of life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the "dark horse" in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office.
“To be merely good enough is to never succeed.”
Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further.
Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored and the inevitable price to be paid by others in lower standards of living than they could have had with the existing resources and technology. p. 24
"It takes two to make a very great career: The man who is great, and the man—almost rarer—who is great enough to see greatness and say so."
p. 512
Easy victories aren’t worth winning.
p. 54
With ever greater frequency they annihilate themselves, for success breeds contempt for those very qualities that purchased it.
