“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… — 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 remains in the new millennium: the most damning incarnation of the connection between achievement and personal… — 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… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“In early America, fear of failure loomed largest on Sunday. Monday morning dawned about the year i8oo. By then, "failure" meant an entrepreneurial fall… — Scott A. Sandage Copy Share Image
“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
