Sandage Quotes & Sayings

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. — Susan Sontag

All humans are brothers. We came from the same supernova — Allan Sandage

The world is too complicated in all parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle-an architect. — Allan Sandage

I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul. — Scott A. Sandage

Now that I'm 50 and respectably settled in New England and markedly happier and more contented than I was in my youth, I modestly hope there's time to realize some of my youthful goals before I croak, but I'll take what I can get. — Kate Christensen

I think one purpose is very clear among corporations and business leaders: make profits, deliver high return for stockholders, conquer markets, service consumers and create jobs. But in today's world, demands from corporations and leaders are much more than that. We need to understand what people really want at the very end. — Vicente Fox

Debtors and idlers abounded in the colonial era, but failing in business was not so calamitous as falling from grace... In Early America, fear of failure loomed largest on Sunday. Monday morning dawned about the year 1800. By then, 'failure' meant an entrepreneurial failure. — Scott A. Sandage

Most people say that Shakespeare rocked merely because most people say that Shakespeare rocked. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Born Losers is a beautiful piece of writing. Scott Sandage is history's Dickens; his bleak house, the late nineteenth century world of almost anonymous American men who failed. With wit and sympathy, Sandage illuminates the grey world of credit evaluation, a little studied smothering arm of capitalism. This is history as it should be, a work of art exploring the social cost of our past. — William S. McFeely

I had the feeling I'd just found something I didn't even know I'd lost. We hovered above the moment like two rain clouds, until I said: Don't swear off all fruit just because you ate one bad apple. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing. — Allan Sandage

In one respect a cavalry charge is very like ordinary life. So long as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth. But as soon as you have lost a stirrup, have a rein cut, have dropped your weapon, are wounded, or your horse is wounded, then is the moment when from all quarters enemies rush upon you. Such — Winston S. Churchill

At the same time that "self-made" entered the nation's lexicon, so did the notion of abject failure. Once reserved to describe a discrete financial episode - "I made a failure," a merchant would say after losing his shop - "failure" in antebellum America became a matter of identity, describing not an event but a person. As the historian Scott Sandage explains in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, the phrase "I feel like a failure" comes to us so naturally today "that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul." It became conventional wisdom in the early nineteenth century, Sandage explains, that people who failed had a problem native to their constitution. They weren't just losers; they were "born losers. — Joshua Wolf Shenk

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense? — David Mitchell

'Limbo' has been one of the greatest hits of my career. A great response all over the world, not just Latinos but people in Europe and America. — Daddy Yankee

The age of the self-made man was also the age of the broken man... This 'American sense' looked upon failure as a 'moral sieve' that trapped the loafer and passed the true man through. Such ideologies fixed blame squarely on individual faults, not extenuating circumstances. — Scott A. Sandage

Let us be thankful for the fools,' Mark Twain wrote with typically dark humor in 1897. 'But for them the rest of us could not succeed.' Of all the paradoxes of failure in America, surely this is the darkest. Long ago, we saw through old fables of rags to riches; it is still fun to dream, but we know that we are partaking of a cultural myth. But if we do not quite believe in that kind of success, our faith in the myths of failure is unshaken. We are merrily cynical about whether the average tycoon really tugged on those bootstraps, but we still believe with deadly seriousness that the reasons for failure are usually individual-- "in the man." Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it. The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser. — Scott A. Sandage

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It's great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I'm not complaining, ... Those who find growing old terrible are people who haven't done what they wanted with their lives. — Martha Gellhorn

We can't understand the universe in any clear way without the supernatural. — Allan Sandage

Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong. — Allan Sandage