For the most part I have looked for the oldest attribution I could find, but there are bound to be errors and accidental distortions. This book makes no pretence to be a scholarly work, but I have tried to be as accurate as this elusive subject allows.
As a British writer one thing that struck me forcibly while I was researching attributions was how many of these quotations come from American mouths and pens. This is not entirely explained by the sheer size of the country or its position as the world’s most powerful nation. There is something cultural at work here too.
My contention is that Americans learned the value of the ‘sound bite’ long before the advent of mass media. The relentless presence of TV images across US society today may have developed their habit of packaging speech in exploding parcels, but the tendency seems indigenous. Even a casual comparison of US and English language patterns up to 200 years ago shows the Americans to be far less inclined to the elaborate verbal courtesies and locutions that characterised English opinion-formers of a past age. Vestiges of that linguistic difference (steeped, as it is, in class, education and tradition) persist today, though they are steadily being eroded by the forces of globalisation.
I have wreaked my revenge on this horde of quotable Americans by ruthlessly anglicising their spelling. The Empire strikes back. As the critic James Agate wrote:
‘Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal, will always pretend that it isn’t there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he’ll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something he would like it to be.’
Note Agate’s employment of the masculine collective pronoun, as they used to call it in my grammar school days. Political correctness has booted such usage out of contemporary speech (and robbed it of a certain elegance) but you will find the older quotations in this book dominated by ‘he’ and ‘man’. Please blame history not this author and adjust for gender.
I have sorted this selection of quotations alphabetically into themes and subjects that I trust readers will find appropriate. Some of the distinctions are quite subtle; there are obvious links between Achievement, Success and Winning, for example, and between Failure and Mistakes. I recommend ‘surfing’ around associated themes for the best results. One of the advantages of this Kindle edition is that the reader can quickly jump to the required section using the ‘Go To’ function and hyperlinks, but this is also the sort of book that, I hope you agree, rewards browsing.
I hope I have succeeded in avoiding the predictable and over-familiar. I want you to be surprised by unexpected gems, to experience the same pleasure I felt when I first came across them, to nod your head at succinct sagacity, smile at truths eloquently revealed, have your mind expanded by insightful observation and your heart lifted by inspirational thoughts.
I have tried to sow a little wit among the wisdom – a seedling from Groucho Marx here, from Woody Allen there. Every so often a cartoon character I have uninventively named Murphy pops up with one of those ironic maxims that send up business and office life and help us remember what my friend and sometime colleague Benjamin Zander calls Rule Number 6: ‘Don’t take yourself so goddam seriously’.
Thanks to cartoonist Frank Taylor for creating the Murphy character and to his colleagues at NB Group who helped to realise the original print edition. Working backwards along the production line, an encore of thanks to Julie McPherson and Sue Little for converting my bits of paper into workable manuscript, to Laura James and my son Joe for their hours of help researching sources, and especially to my wife Paula, not only for encouraging me to start the project but for shaping it in a publishable form.
The original print edition of this little book of quotations found its way into offices and homes all over the place (and is still available on Amazon). I trust this Kindle edition will find new readers in even more places and circumstances.
DAVID WILLIAMS
Ability
Whether you believe you can, or whether you believe you can’t, you’re absolutely right.
Henry Ford, US automobile manufacturer, engineer (1863-1947)
Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else – and usually it’s reading his own handwriting.
J Norman Collie, British mountaineer (1859-1942)
If a man is to called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King Jr, US civil rights leader (1929-1968)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, programme a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.
Lazarus Long, character in a novel by Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)
Talent never asks, ‘Will they like it?’ Talent pleases itself. That’s the difference between talent and ordinary.
Larry King, US talk show host (b.1933)
People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.
Albert Bandura, US psychologist (b.1925)
Achievement
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
Michelangelo, Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet (1475-1564)
Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
William Jennings Bryant, US statesman (1860-1925)
You cannot do anything better in this life than run your own perfect race.
Roger Black, British athlete (b.1966)
The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.
Martina Navratilova, Czech/US tennis player (b.1956)
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Walter Bagehot, British author, economist (1826-1877)
Most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared impossible before they were done.
Louis Brandeis, US supreme court justice (1856-1941)
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
Sir Edmund Hillary, New Zealand mountaineer and explorer (1919-2008)
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.