Successful quotes
4.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside successful — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Why was the United States so afraid of an independent South Vietnam? Well, I think the reason again is pretty clear from the internal government documents. Precisely what they were afraid of was that the "takeover" of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development - and that the whole region might work."
"Latin America is now exploring new and often promising paths in rejecting the doctrinal notions of "globalization," and also in the remarkable growth of popular movements and authentic participation in the political systems. How successful this will be is more a matter for action than for speculation."
"In other countries, rich and poor, education remains substantially free, with educational standards that rank high in global comparisons. Even in the US, higher education was almost free during the economically successful years before the neoliberal reaction - and it was a much poorer country then. The GI bill provided free education to huge numbers of people - white men overwhelmingly - who would probably never have gone to college, a great benefit to them personally and to the whole society. Tuition at private colleges was far below today's exorbitant costs."
"Europe is being subjected to the kinds of programs that devastated Latin America for many years. Latin America has thrown them out and is pulling out: It's successful; it's democratizing; it's economically developing; and it's free from the shrapnel of US imperialism for 25 years. Meanwhile, Western Europe is destroying itself systematically, destroying itself going in the opposite direction."
"The attack on unions has been far more extreme here [in U.S], and it has been much more successful."
"We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood....What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!"
"It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide."
"There must be the... generating force of Love behind every effort destined to be successful."
"I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society."
"We are always just one successful terrorist attack away from a nuclear disaster."
"To run a successful business, you have to be tough."
"One key ingredient to successful technology integration is not forgetting the autonomy and the fun."
"Being successful entails being able to not only get along with people, but also to give something back"
"The reason I do Shark Tank isn't to try take make more money of the deals, even though every deal I want to make money off of and even more so I want the entrepreneurs to be very successful and make money, but Shark Tank sends a message to everybody that the American Dream is alive and well."
"Expect the unexpected, and always be ready - everyone has inside them what it takes to be successful. You just have to be ready to unleash it when the opportunity presents itself."
"So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising."
"Law Number XXIX: Executives who do not produce successful results hold on to their jobs only about five years. Those who produce effective results hang on about half a decade."
"I want to see the numbers that prove that show-business marriages are any less successful than other marriages. It's just very public when they fail."
"Active, successful natures act, not according to the maxim, "know thyself," but as if prompted by the commandment: will a self, and so become a self."
"The new puritans have been highly successful. All of the preconditions for new prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco are in place. ... Indeed, the future agenda of the federal government has already been established to outlaw alcohol and tobacco in the near future. ... If current trends persist, America will be moving toward stricter prohibitions, greater restrictions, and more centralized control over consumption. This represents an erosion of liberty at its most fundamental level."
