Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.
When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you are going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce.
Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That's not a guess, it's a guarantee. With pride, it's not a matter of 'if' we will fall, but 'when.' There are no exceptions.
People who pity themselves think, 'Why would I try to do anything? I'll just fail.'
In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.
Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion.
You may not be aware of a recent survey that showed that if the First Amendment were put to a popular vote today, it would fail by a 60% to 40% vote.
And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.
The American Way is an amalgam of our compassion, our strengths, our failings and our attempts to build a better world, a more perfect union.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
Ten years ago, we were seen as a virtually failed state, but today we are a vibrant democracy. You can walk safely through the streets of Bogota these days.
Businesses that fail to develop their staff are twice as likely to collapse. Firms seeking to reposition themselves for the economic upturn need to invest in their staff's flexibility, responsiveness and skills.
Every proposal I'm making, every idea I'm advancing has a single, central purpose: to revive a failing economy and give working Americans the help and security they need.
The deficit only became a big problem in the Reagan-Bush years. For 12 years, Republican presidents talked about balancing the budget, but failed to propose one.
Obama has offered no solutions; his Democratic majority in the Senate has failed to produce a budget in 1,200 days; and they have both obstructed the Republicans' proposed remedies.
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for.
If I'm not moved by what happens at the end of this play, then I've completely failed, and so has the play, and so has our production. And if that's the case then there really isn't any reason to want to do it.
And I think detente had manifestly failed, and that the pursuit of it was encouraging Soviet expansion and rendering the world more dangerous, and especially rendering the Western world in greater peril.
There was no indication of panic. The broken files marched back in steady step. The effort was nobly made and failed from the blows that could not be fended.
And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.
