Born Losers Quotes

“The age of the self-made man was also the age of the broken man... This ‘American sense’ looked upon failure as a ‘moral sieve’ that trapped the loafer and passed the true man through. Such ideologies fixed blame squarely on individual faults, not extenuating circumstances.”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“Debtors and idlers abounded in the colonial era, but failing in business was not so calamitous as falling from grace... In Early America, fear of failure loomed largest on Sunday. Monday morning dawned about the year 1800. By then, ‘failure’ meant an entrepreneurial failure.”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“We do this because a century and a half ago we embraced business
as the dominant model for our outer and inner lives. Ours is an ideology of achieved identity; obligatory striving is its method, and failure and success are its outcomes. We reckon our incomes once a year but audit ourselves daily, by standards of long-forgotten origin. Who thinks of the old counting house when we "take stock" of how we "spend" our lives, take "credit" for our gains, or try not to end up "third rate" or "good for nothing"? Someday, we hope, "the bottom line" will show that we "amount to something." By this kind of talk we "balance" our whole lives, not just our accounts. Willy Loman speaks this way. Choosing suicide to launch his sons with insurance money, he asks, "Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?" He insists that a man is not a piece of fruit to be eaten and the peel discarded, but he does not see that a man is not a cash register.'°”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“To call a man "a complete failure" tallied both the economics of capitalism and the economics of selfhood; that is, the external and internal transactions that reckon how we see ourselves and how others see us. Soon a man would be nothing more nor less than his occupation. Thoreau ground this axe in an 1854 lecture called "Getting a Living," which he mailed off to the Atlantic Monthly-under the punning title "Life without Principle"-two months before his death. He complained that people called him "a loafer" for taking daily walks in the woods. Yet were he to spend the day as a timber speculator, denuding the landscape, he would be "esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."22”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“In early America, fear of failure loomed largest on Sunday. Monday morning dawned about the year i8oo. By then, "failure" meant an entrepreneurial fall from grace-"a breaking in business," as Caleb Alexander's Columbian Dictionary duly noted. Failure was an incident, not an identity, in lexicons and common usage. In awkward but typical phrasing, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported in 1793, "They have not yet indeed made a failure, but they can do very little business." Early Americans "made" failures, but it took a while before failures made-or unmade-men.”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“A century ago, in his 1905 classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that striving for success is a compulsory virtue, even a sacred duty in American culture. "The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live," Weber explained. "It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action." These rules include the rational pursuit of profit, the perpetual increase of capital as an end in itself, the development of an acquisitive personality, and the belief that ceaseless work is a necessity of life.7”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“By 19oo, anybody could end up "a `Nobody,"' plodding down the "many paths leading to the Land of `Nowhere."' Failure had become what it remains in the new millennium: the most damning incarnation of the connection between achievement
and personal identity. "I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

“Someday they would rise and fall in the world the sermon presaged, where berry picking was a higher crime than bankruptcy. If a man could fail simply by not succeeding or not striving, then ambition was not an opportunity but an obligation. Following the casket to the grave, stooping here and there to collect petals that wafted from it, the children buried more than the odd little man they had seen in the woods or on the street. Part of the American Dream of success went asunder: the part that gave them any choice in the matter.”
― Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America