Partial Success Quotes

Personally, emotionally, I'd rather divorce myself from the world than face the heartbreak of partial success. Because partial success implies overwhelming failure.

Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.

If I can be right 75 per cent of the time I shall come up to the fullest measure of my hopes.

If you do it right 51 percent of the time you will end up a hero.

When you try to do something big its hard to fail completely.

Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days…. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

It's the perfect definition of a settlement. Both parties didn't get what they wanted.

In politics, victory is never total.

I'd rather make 50 percent of something than 100 percent of nothing.

Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.

But if you couldn't do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

You can't please all of the people all of the time; you can only please some of the people some of the time.

going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way

Die-hard conservatives thought that if I couldn't get everything I asked for, I should jump off the cliff with the flag flying-go down in flames. No, if I can get 70 or 80 percent of what it is I'm trying to get ... I'll take that and then continue to try to get the rest in the future.

Perfect concordance among reformers is not to be expected; and men who are honestly struggling towards the light cannot hope to attain at one bound to the complete truth.

A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

Achieve great goals in stages, each of which is probably imperfect by absolute standards.