Mission Failure Quotes

The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.

Mission accomplished? The mission in Iraq, as laid out by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, has failed.

My biggest emotion on Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank explosion was disappointment that we had lost the landing.

The failings in Afghanistan don't fall on the shoulders of the American service personnel trying to complete their mission. The failure falls on military leadership unable to adapt to irregular warfare, and a Congress that blindly continues to fund failure.

Houston, we've had a problem.

If the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were private companies and were chronically unable to accomplish one of their key missions, their shareholders would have long ago revolted, fired their management, and their stock would be trading at values near zero.

I had a goal. I was on a mission. And somewhere along the line I lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing. I got out of my training program.

You basically have a group of four spies who are chosen for a mission they feel for the fact of how competent they are and how their expertise and they're the right one for the job. But ultimately they find out they've been actually chosen for their incompetence.

It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission.

Anything from making a mistake on an experiment that would ruin some scientist on earth's experiment - career, potentially - to doing something wrong with the satellite that a country was depending on for its communications, to making some mistake that could actually cost you and the crew either a mission or your lives. So there is a lot of pressure that's put on every astronaut to just make sure that he or she understands exactly what to do, exactly when to do it, and is trained and prepared to carry it out.

I don’t think that there is ever a Mission Accomplished with an oil spill…the consequences go on for years.

CIA has learned some tough lessons, especially when asked to tackle missions that fall outside our expertise.

The EU report speaks for itself. The statement in my view shows that the mission has turned out to be something worse than a farce, ... We shall in the coming days and weeks see what we can do to expose the pack of lies and innuendoes that characterise the garbage in this report.

If a military mission has no guide who knows the inside information of the opponents, it will likely have to retreat half of the way.

We had a mission at PayPal - which was to create a new financial system, a new world currency, and we failed. We were a financial success, but we didn't succeed at the purpose of our company.

A mission to entertain the world is a good one because it's impossible to achieve.

If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq - which the administration defines as a 'unified, stable, democratic and secure nation' - it won't be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that's the point.

We find an organization that is deeply troubled by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions that are given to them.

He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

The first week in intelligence school, you learn there are only two conditions in life. There is policy success, or there is intel failure. There is no other condition in life.

Without a mission statement, you may get to the top of the ladder and then realize it was leaning against the wrong building!