The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
I'm more comfortable with whatever's wrong with me than my father was whenever he felt he failed or didn't measure up to the standard he set.
I had a lot of failed relationships, a lot of unhappiness, a lot of shame and embarrassment, bad self-image stuff.
I'm fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we've won a lot. I have some kids who haven't failed that much. But when they get to college, they're going to fail some time. That's a thing that I can help them the most with.
The vaunted Democratic stimulus bill has failed to stimulate anything other than a few federal bureaucrats.
If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.
I do remember my first purchase: the Partridge Family's 'Greatest Hits.' I got it for $3.99 at a failed chain of pre-Wal-Mart-type stores called Jamesway. God, I'm old.
After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.
The only thing Google has failed to do, so far, is fail.
Before 'Whiplash,' I'd had a string of failed scripts. I'd pour my blood, sweat and tears into them, and no one would like them.
There was no reality to pain when it left one, thought while it held one fast all other realities failed.
As evidenced during my failed audition, I'm a thorough introvert who would completely hate living in a 'Real World' house. I would have taken my Ikea comforter to the confessional room and never come out.
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
As long as you gave it your best shot, even if in the opinion of others 'you failed,' you didn't fail.
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
In fact, if you look upon the situation today, there is great division in the world and we have failed to capitalize on that unity to finish the job in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda.
At this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe.
We haven't done action movies in Germany. We had some attempts in the '90s, but they failed.
Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license.
In Syria, while secretary of state, Clinton watched as United Nations resolution after U.N. resolution failed. She accomplished nothing except to repeat the refrain, 'Assad must go.'
By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in Seattle... Seattle was the coming place. So I joined the line of hopefuls.
I have asked myself once or twice lately what was my natural bent. I have no doubt at all: It is to look at each day for the evil of that day and have a go at it, and that is why I have never failed to have an acute interest in each morning's letters.
My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.
The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who 'disappeared'. That's what the candle is for.
When you say a 'former child star,' you may as well say 'failed child star.'
A basic truth that the history of the creation of the transistor reveals is that the foundations of transistor electronics were created by making errors and following hunches that failed to give what was expected.
I failed at the biggest things there are in life. I failed in my health, I failed in my marriage, I failed in everything, and I've picked myself up and gone on.
In early church polemics, Jews are deemed no longer worthy of their own Scriptures because they have failed to accept Christ as the Messiah.
What is there to be afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is you fail. So what? I failed at a lot of things. My first record was horrible.
I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher, like my parents. I failed - no, I didn't fail a class, I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history, through the plays of the time. My God, those were boring plays.
After struggling for so long in the industry and writing so many failed songs and hearing 'no' for so long - I'm so grateful every time I hear a song that I was a part of on the radio.
Even today, when the Obama administration has liberalized travel to Cuba - and failed to reverse that liberalization when Alan Gross was imprisoned - there are limits.
Obama isn't just too big to fail. He's too big to know. Obama is so vital to the country and to the world, he must be kept out of the loop in order to save him from his failed presidency.
Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
The test is to recognize the mistake, admit it and correct it. To have tried to do something and failed is vastly better than to have tried to do nothing and succeeded.
