Samuel Smiles Quotes
It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.
Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help. John Murray, 1859, p. 268.
Politicians, bureaucrats, and appointees all will make mistakes unless they do nothing. Learning from those mistakes is an opportunity to avoid the same or similar errors in the future as well as to become wiser in general. However, many politicians are reluctant to admit that they made an error. In a polarized political atmosphere, political opponents will castigate politicians who admit to a , administrative, policy or judgment error. None the less, the greatest of the politicians learned from past errors and bcame great, in part as a result of their learning from mistakes.
Samuel Smiles was a Scottish author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he promoted the idea that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His primary work, Self-Help (1859), promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism" and had lasting effects on British political thought.
