The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.
Ashley Montague

The defeat of the Americans in Canada and the advantages gained by the British arms in the Jerseys, and indeed for some months in every other quarter, gave to the royal cause an air of triumph.
Mercy Otis Warren

The failure of the Russian Socialist Republic will be the defeat of the proletariat of the whole world.
Karl Liebknecht

The fight ended. For both was victory. For both there was defeat.
Anna Wickham

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
Russell Baker

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.
Sun Tzu

The great leaders of the second world war alliance, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, understood the twin sides of destruction and salvation. Their war aims were not only to defeat fascism, but to create a world of shared prosperity.
Jeffrey Sachs

The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
Robert Green Ingersoll

The greatest thing the Democrats have ever done for me was to defeat me for the governor of Tennessee.
Roy Acuff

The inconvenience, the glaring lights, the long hours of waiting, and the repetition of every scene are all calculated to defeat anything more than a real mastery of love technique.
Ivor Novello

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.
Slobodan Milosevic

The mark of a great player is in his ability to come back. The great champions have all come back from defeat.
Sam Snead

The most important thing in our war preparations is to teach all our people to hate U.S. imperialism. Otherwise, we will not be able to defeat the U.S. imperialists who boast of their technological superiority.
Kim Il Sung

The natural urge when running a distance is to push harder and finish sooner - to race against time. Every second behind a deadline is a little defeat.
Joe Henderson

The object of China's strategy is inexorably to supplant the United States as the world's premier economic power, and if necessary, to defeat us militarily.
Frank Gaffney

The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
Sun Tzu

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.
James A. Michener

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
Winston Churchill

The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and its errors, its successes and its setbacks, can never be relaxed and never abandoned.
Dag Hammarskjold