Collective Failure Quotes

A weak people and its equally debilitated leaders are bludgeoned by history. It maims them into the cripples that they are meant to be.

The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

Great minds sink alike, right?

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

I'm very optimistic, but I'm optimistic about individuals, not institutions.

If you can't even manage to to force your own presumably democratic governments to allow you to do good things for yourselves, then you probably deserve to become extinct.

I lose faith in any cooperative, commonwealth; cannot see how, after all, there will be incentives.

Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out.

That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans.

I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.

There is hope in people, not in society, not in systems, but in you and me.

And the crowd often betrayed the people

The many fail: the one succeeds.

A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

I don't care how good you play, if the team is losing, it doesn't matter.

Great armies are nothing but a collection of weakness.

It all relies on teamwork. We could be running fifth all day, and we come down pit road for the last stop and the pit crew messes up, then we all go down and not just them.

Ten years have now passed since many of us first felt the jolt of history-when the second plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We knew from that moment that things can go terribly wrong in our world-not because life is unfair, or moral progress impossible, but because we have failed, generation after generation, to abolish the delusions of our ignorant ancestors.

What has changed is that people have stopped working together.

Each firm held its rope; one by one, they realized that no matter how strongly they pulled, the balloon would eventually lift them off their feet.

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

The promise of individual and collective emancipation implicit in the notion of progress appears to be broken.

It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the 'international community' had learned nothing since the Holocaust.