Failure Of Nerve Quotes & Sayings

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student. — Paul Russell

So often, environmentalists and others working to slow the destruction are capable of plainly describing the problems (Who wouldn't be? The problems are neither subtle nor cognitively challenging), yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response to these clear and clearly insoluble problems, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination. Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler asking him to stop committing atrocities, and was mystified that it didn't work. I continue to write letters to the editor pointing out untruths, and continue to be surprised each time the newspaper publishes its next absurdity. At least I've stopped writing to politicians. — Derrick Jensen

Choking is being in a position to win, and then experiencing some critical failure of nerve or spirit. That never happened to me. And I can't help but think it was because I was never afraid to lose. — Pete Sampras

The statistics reveal a failure of nerve on the part of many Christians. They seem to be simply unable to muster the strength necessary to develop a tenacious commitment to the truthfulness of Scripture. — Douglas Groothuis

The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve. — John Gregory Dunne

C. S. Lewis, who was once described by a friend as a man in love with the imagination, believed that a complacent acceptance of the status quo reflects more than a failure of nerve. — C.S. Lewis

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts. — George Santayana

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning. — Cornel West

Failure isn't a problem. It's the fear of failure that's the limiting factor. You can't lose your nerve for the big failure, because it's the exact same nerve you need for the big success. — Regina E. Dugan

Aukeman quotes Norman Mailer:
"No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life and we suffer from a collective failure or nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people." Welcome to Painterland (2016) Chapter 4, p.108 — Anastasia Aukeman

History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve. — Buzz Aldrin

First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure. — Barton Gellman