The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy.

What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.

I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you're good at.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it's fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me.

It's probably foolish to expect relationships to go on forever and to say that because something only lasts 10 years, it's a failure.

Failure to accord credit to anyone for what he may have done is a great weakness in any man.

Revolutionaries were depressed and close to emotional breakdown; after the failure, they left successively.

I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome, but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way, it is about answering to yourself.

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

I've loved every minute I've spent in television. And I've had much more failure, as traditionally measured, than success in television. I've done four shows, and only one of them was the 'West Wing.'

Pride is ugly. It says, 'If you succeed, I am a failure.'

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose measures have the best chance of success, but to those with the ability to 'sell' their propaganda. Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the error that the ruler makes.

Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.

Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution.

The Communist bloc of old was a study in the failure of failure. Losers in the Soviet economy were the people at the end of the long lines for consumer goods. Worse losers were the people who had spent hours getting to the head of the line, only to be told that the goods were unavailable.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.

We keep score in life because it matters. It counts. It matters. Too many people opt out and never discover their own abilities because they fear failure. They don't understand commitment.

Those on the downside of rising economic inequality generally do not want government policies that look like handouts. They typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them. Redistribution feels demeaning. It feels like being labeled a failure.

Failure usually works for me in the end.

I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.

Relying on nothing but scientific knowledge to produce an engineering solution is to invite frustration at best and failure at worst.

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

My work ethic came from my parents and my fear of failure. I came from a small, predominantly black school and I didn't want to let them down.

Working hard to fulfill a dream or instinct and learning over time it doesn't work, doesn't mean a career is over and a reputation killed. When a reputation is killed, it's when failure comes as a result of loss of integrity or judgement... breaking of laws.

Working with food was fraught with anxiety when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and we lived in fear of crop failure.

We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.

To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.

In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.

There's something to be said for failing. It's not the failure you feel, it's the failure that people project when something disappoints. You're back to ground zero, where there's no expectations, and that's where I like to be.

He who refuses to stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success or the fear of failure - who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands erect, is the only victor.

My biggest failure is 'Metal Gear.' It's my biggest failure and my biggest success.

Be honest about how you approach failure. Don't just be critical of yourself, because that can be self-serving. Approach it honestly, assess your performance, and assess the areas where you have fallen short. Correct them and move on. Don't dwell on it. Don't hold on to it.

Don't think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.

There are people who say that you can't experiment... That condemns you to failure.

Delivering a successful presentation could mean landing a major new contract, better prices for your services, or getting the funding you need. Failure can mean lost customers and a business that never gets off the ground.

Without exposure to potential failure, there is no risk.

Risk is to do something that 99 percent of the time would be a failure.

Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.

Every time you go out there to do something, you wonder if you can do it. There's no assured success. There's no secret recipe for success. Every time you go out there, you go out there with the possibility of great failure.

If we say we trust in Him, but in reality do not, then God, taking us at our word, lets us see that we do not really confide in Him; and hence failure arises.

With everything that is complex, we learn. If you don't learn, then it's an utter and abject failure. If you do learn, and you're able to apply that to the next situation, then you take away a measure of success.

Our inner beliefs trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage lasting change by canceling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify our inaction and then wish away the result. I call them belief triggers.

For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system.

The reason was the failure of both Japan and China to understand each other and the inability of America and the European powers to sympathize, without prejudice, with the peoples of East Asia.

No matter how well things are going, failure and disaster are just around the corner. So celebrate the good, but be ready for the bad.