#failed

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#class #failed-systems #greed #dreams

I've been a strong financial and political supporter of, first, President Bush Sr. when he was running for president, and even when he ran for president a time or two and failed. ↗

— Kenneth Lay

#bush #even #failed #financial #first

If our countries had war the one with the other, that was no cause that he should put us to death; with which they were out of heart that their cruel pretense failed them. For which God be forever-more praised. ↗

— William Adams

#countries #cruel #death #failed #god

In their greatest hour of need, the world failed the people of Rwanda. ↗

— Kofi Annan

#greatest #hour #need #people #rwanda

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on. ↗

— John Barton

#aside #cannot #even #failed #give

The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who "disappeared". That's what the candle is for. ↗

— Peter Benenson

#candle #disappeared #failed #kidnapped #prison

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life. ↗

— Arnold Bennett

#affairs #after #be happy #challenge #chiefly

I should have forfeited my own self-respect, and perhaps the good opinion of my countrymen, if I had failed to resent such an injury by calling the offender in question to a personal account. ↗

— Preston Brooks

#calling #countrymen #failed #good #good opinion

For too long the world has failed to recognise that the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement are about fine athletics and fine art. ↗

— Avery Brundage

#art #athletics #failed #fine #fine art

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

— Robert Byrd

#bush #cheney #failed #iraq #laid