“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,… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share
“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’… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“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’… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“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… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share
“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… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share
“We do this because a century and a half ago we embraced business as the dominant model for our outer and inner lives. Ours… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“Someday they would rise and fall in the world the sermon presaged, where berry picking was a higher crime than bankruptcy. If a man… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“By 19oo, anybody could end up "a 'Nobody,"' plodding down the "many paths leading to the Land of 'Nowhere."' Failure had become what it… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“Debtors and idlers abounded in the colonial era, but failing in business was not so calamitous as falling from grace... In Early America, fear… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“To call a man "a complete failure" tallied both the economics of capitalism and the economics of selfhood; that is, the external and internal… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
