By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability is simply attracting the best-educated most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.

I don't understand a way to work other than bold-facedly running towards failure.

As long as the G.O.P. led by its increasingly visible women continues to insist that the problem is not their policies but women's failure to understand their own lives and interests the gender gap won't go away.

Without failure there is no sweetness in success. There's no understanding of it.

We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success it's part of success.

Ultimately all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why then have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?

The Bush Administration's failure to be consistently involved in helping Israel achieve peace with the Palestinians has been both wrong for our friendship with Israel as well as badly damaging to our standing in the Arab world.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men kindness and generosity openness honesty understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest sharpness greed acquisitiveness meanness egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.