Set Me Up For Failure Quotes & Sayings

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire. — Adolf Hitler

Self esteem is not the same as being self centered, self absorbed or selfish. Self esteem is also not complacency or overconfidence, both of which and set us up for failure. Self esteem is a strong motivator to work hard. Self esteem is related to mental health and happiness. — Glenn R. Schiraldi

Liberals want to set up social welfare committees to help whites and West Indians love each other in Birmingham. But all such efforts are doomed to failure. For the strong the weak are just too much of a temptation; and in all fairness it seems to me quite wicked for black people to have tempted the powerful with so much powerless-ness for so long. The obvious answer is to redress this imbalance in power. — Lewis Nkosi

Movies which set out to be 'commercial' usually have an artificial look about them-a certain waxlike quality. They allow for no failure, no moment of mistake. — Nicolas Roeg

What happens to a marriage? A persistent failure of kindness, triggered at first, at least in my case, by the inequities of raising children, the sacrifices that take a woman by surprise and that she expects to be matched by her mate but that biology ensures cannot be. Anything could set me off. Any innocuous habit or slight or oversight. The way your father left the lights of the house blazing, day and night. The way he could become so distracted at work that sometimes when I called, he'd put me on hold and forget me, only remembering again when I'd hung up and called back. The way he wore his pain so privately, whistling around the house after we'd had a spat, pretending nonchalance, protecting you and your sisters from discord, hiding behind his good nature, inadvertently — Jan Ellison

It is those who have the distinction of privilege who set the standards of disgust with failure. — Andy Hargreaves

Failure feelings - fear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence - do not spring from some heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel. Nor are they intimations of a set and decided fate which means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind. — Maxwell Maltz

If we don't find what we seek what happen then? Nothing? Everything? Are we set free by our failure, or are we doomed because we failed to find the answer that would have saved us? And how are we supposed to know the difference? — Anne Bishop

When Hamish and I loved each other for a whole year without making love, I did not realize that I had set the mould of my whole life. One could find endless reasons for our abstinence
fear, virtue, ignorance, perversion
but the fact remains that the Hamish pattern was to be endlessly repeated, and with increasing velocity and lack of depth, so that eventually the idea of love ended in me almost the day that it began. Nothing succeeds, they say, life success, and certainly nothing fails like failure. I was successful in my work, so I suppose other successes were too much to hope for. — Margaret Drabble

It's wonderful the way cats bound about,
it's wonderful how men are not found out
so far.
It's miserable how many miserable are
over the spread world at this tick of time.
These mysteries that I'm

rehearsing in the dark did brighter minds
much bother through them ages, whom who
finds
guilty for failure?
Up all we rose with the dawn, springy for pride,
trying all morning. Dazzled, I subside
at noon, noon be my gaoler

and afternoon the deepening of the task
poor Henry set himself long since to ask:
Why? Who? When?
--I don't know, Mr Bones. You asks too much
of such as you & me & we & such
fast cats, worse men. — John Berryman

When the injunction was issued in Birmingham, our failure to obey it bewildered our opponents. They did not know what to do. We did not hide our intentions. In fact, I announced our plan to the press, pointing out that we were not anarchists advocating lawlessness, but that it was obvious to us that the courts of Alabama had misused the judicial process in order to perpetuate injustice and segregation. Consequently, we could not, in good conscience, obey their findings. I intended to be one of the first to set — Martin Luther King Jr.

Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world. The best way is to forget doubts and set about the task in hand ... If you are doing your best, you will not have time to worry about failure. — Robert Hillyer

The TED Fellowship exposed me to a set of youngsters who had wilder ideas than I did - and almost all of them were pursuing their wild and crazy ideas without fear of failure. — Shaffi Mather

What I call bankruptcy of inventiveness is often the result of a failure to set aside the resources necessary to let invention happen. The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can't invent, it's usually because their people are too damn busy. — Tom DeMarco

You can't know what you may achieve until you set aside fear of failure and give it a try. — Laura Kitchell

We need to reflect with great seriousness about why many young people don't feel like getting married ... For fear of failure, many do not want to even think about it ... Many people believe the change that has taken place in recent decades was set in motion by the emancipation of women. But this argument is not valid, it is an insult, a form of misogyny. — Pope Francis

Sometimes failure makes your future because you set the past on fire. — Christopher Titus

Failure to conform to social norms. I prefer to define my sociopathy as a set of traits that inform my personality but don't define me: I am generally free of entangling and irrational emotions, I am strategic and canny, I am intelligent and confident and charming, but I also struggle to react appropriately to other people's confusing and emotion-driven social cues. — M.E. Thomas

Because people learn from their mistakes, Danger. Pain and failure are a natural part of life. It's kind of like a parent who watches their child fall down while learning to walk. Instead of coddling the child, you set them back on their feet and let them try again. They have to stumble before they can run. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

My eyes lingered on her naked body for several minutes. Was our relationship what she wanted? Was it satisfying for her? Was it what she dreamed of when she started falling in love with me? Did reality ever fulfill our dreams? Or do dreams just continually set us up for failure and disappointment? — T.B. Markinson

Books proliferate, and occasionally sell in very large numbers, which claim to have found the rule, or small set of rules, which will guarantee business success. But business is far too complicated, far too difficult an activity to distil into a few simple commands ... It is failure rather than success which is the distinguishing feature of corporate life. — Paul Ormerod

I trace the inequality to a particular set of decisions that we took when we lowered the tax rate from 91% down to very low levels at the top, where we stripped away regulations. So the result of that was not a more dynamic economy, but a more unequal society. We tried the experiment of trickle-down. A third of a century later, we can say fairly definitively that it was a failure. — Joseph Stiglitz

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them. — Lynn Margulis

Though events set up the defining moments which can evoke profiles in righteousness, outward commotions cannot excuse any failure of inward resolve, even if some seem to unravel so easily. — Neal A. Maxwell

Freedom and Liberty cannot exist without Individual Responsibilty. Failure to exercise Individual Responsibilty forfeits your right to self-governance and delivers it to Government which, through force, will set the parameters of your life. — Brian Wilson

Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man's unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God's help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires. — Ludwig Feuerbach

The only way our faith will ever strengthen is for us to use it. We need to apply thought and prayer to our decisions and then trust God for the outcome. We need to set our sights on growing in faith, not shrinking back for fear of failure. — Lysa TerKeurst

Many things that human words have upset are set at rest again by the
silence of animals. Animals move through the world like a caravan of
silence. A whole world, that of nature and that of animals, is filled
with silence. Nature and animals seem like protuberances of silence.
The silence of animals and the silence of nature would not be so great
and noble if it were merely a failure of language to materialize.
Silence has been entrusted to the animals and to nature as something
created for its own sake. — Max Picard

Set your sights so high that even failure has in it an echo of glory. — Anonymous

I'm going to have to start you off easy. Can't pull out the big guns on the first night. I'd just set myself up for failure on the second date."
Putting her hands on her hips, she tilted her head. "Is that what you did last night in bed? I thought you were holding out on me."
"What the hell, Ash!"
She burst out laughing.
"That is not what you are supposed to tell a man! Repeat after me: I ruined you for all men, all the while fulfilling your every fantasy. — Aly Martinez

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well. — Charles Baudelaire

Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success. — Denis Waitley

Set goals so big that unless God helps you, you will be a miserable failure. — Bill Bright

The ostrich-approach of burying your head in the sand, when confronting your areas of weakness, becomes a self-set trigger for failure. — Archibald Marwizi

It is quite possible that, even if you set the most relevant, realistic goals, you may not achieve them in the way or the time you wanted to. Life may throw something unexpected in your path, which stops you from achieving what you want, when you want. This is not failure. Feeling like you have failed is bound to lead to low mood, and can often come about if things haven't quite gone according to plan. However, the best thing to do is to draw a mental line under the experience, learn from what has happened and try again. As long as you are still trying, you are working towards your long-term aims; and as long as you are doing that, you are never truly failing. — Anna Barnes

If you expect more from yourself than from others, you are saying that you are better than others and, therefore, must perform at a superior level. I do not mean that you should not set goals for yourself. Rather, the question is, how do you react if you cannot meet these goals? Honestly admitting that you may have not done your best is not judgement. It is judgement when you draw a conclusion about yourself based on your ideas about failure.
Honesty involves taking responsibility; judgment has to do with blame. To view yourself as bad or a failure because you did not accomplish what you set out to do is judgment. To state clearly and simply that you did not accomplish your plan is taking responsibility. — Judith Hanson Lasater

If you've gone into a marriage and you haven't been clear about how you're going to handle money, how you want to raise kids, who is going to work or stay home or what have you, then you've set yourself up for failure. — Phil McGraw

This Creative Mechanism within you is impersonal. It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending upon the goals which you yourself set for it. Present it with success goals and it functions as a Success Mechanism. Present it with negative goals, and it operates just as impersonally, and just as faithfully as a Failure Mechanism. — Maxwell Maltz