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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
by caf 11y ago
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.
-- Teddy Roosevelt
- scrollaway 11y agoSorry for sidetracking but this is a really big annoyance of mine on hn/reddit. A quote without any context is just an invitation to a pissing contest between who can google the most appropriate random piece of text some famous dead guy said. It's not exactly constructive. All you're saying here is "to hell with the critics" and making it seem like TR agrees with that viewpoint wrt greek economics 100 years after his death.
- caf 11y agoFrankly, I thought this would be perfectly obvious, so did not need to be explicitly stated: My intention was to underscore that criticism of the ex-FM from the sidelines should be tempered with the knowledge that there are intractable problems here which he was genuinely attempting to solve. That this might be taken to imply that the long-dead author of the quote which I used for its poetry somehow endorses a position in contemporary political debate is so obviously absurd that I cannot imagine a HN reader doing so.
- lllllll 11y agoInteresting, I found this quote very appropiate here, specially because its meaning is quite ambiguous to me. And so are the times we are living in the EU. For instance, given Varoufakis's resignation, we could interpret the man in different ways: 1) As a person who chose not to be in the arena(in TR's words). 2) A man who was already in the arena but already failed while daring greatly. 3) A man who was already in the arena and arrived at triumph of high achievement, by allowing the Greek people to challenge the Troika with a referendum. And his resignation is just another triumphal move. I do agree tho that filling comment threads with open-to-interpretation quotes is not very constructuve. Still one here one there can make the issue less black and white - which is good IMHO.