Sunday, October 14, 2007

The other view

Well, after the somewhat negative tone of an earlier post commenting on a TechCrunch item, here's something to get your eyes on the horizon, your foot on the accelerator and your heart in gear.

To hear the following Teddy Roosevelt quote from someone with the entrepreneurial credentials of Yossi Vardi really adds something special:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Churchillian, I'd call that, except that Churchill was always better on matters of war than more subtle and pervasive issues like citizenship.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Churchill also had uniquely vulnerable moments when he vented his deepest fears and subtle observations on human nature. He once said he thought it was horrible that he was constituted in such a way that most of his interests in public life centred on war. It is among Churchill's greatest merits that he took fateful decisions with the full understanding of the human import of those decisions.

Francis said...

Good to hear from you - I didn't know his comment about his own interest in war - it seems wholy consistent with both his depression and his leadership, and adds a new dimension to both.

God spare us from being taken into war by those with no experience of it. In fact I believe that the only Western leader involved in the current Iraq conflict with combat experience was Chirac. Interesting.