When I was a child, I saw my father diving to the deepest point in the ocean with the U.S. Navy.
Bertrand PiccardRead
The way the public sees it is this. If we don't leave, we are idiots. If we do leave but don't succeed in our mission, we are incompetent. But if we do succeed, it's because it was easy and anyone could have done it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the challenges of public perception and judgment regarding success and failure.
Bertrand Piccard expresses the notion that public perception is often harsh and unforgiving. Regardless of the outcome, individuals face criticism: they are deemed foolish for not taking risks, incompetent if they fail, and their successes are belittled as mere luck or ease. This reflects a broader commentary on how society evaluates actions, often overlooking the complexity and effort behind them.
Themes
Public PerceptionSuccessFailureJudgmentRisk
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about entrepreneurship to emphasize the importance of taking risks.
More from Bertrand Piccard
All quotes →Pioneering spirit should continue, not to conquer the planet or space ... but rather to improve the quality of life.
Bertrand PiccardRead
Nothing can prevent us from another day and night, and the myth of perpetual flight.
Bertrand PiccardRead
Adventure is something out of the usual pattern, a point at which you cannot avoid confronting the unknown, so that you have to dig inside yourself to find the courage and resources to deal with what may lie ahead, and to succeed.
Bertrand PiccardRead
What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.
Bertrand PiccardRead
Welcome to those who believe in the power of dreams and who would like to join me in my exploration of life.
Bertrand PiccardRead
Similar quotes
The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.
George SteinerRead
Arms and laws do not flourish together.
Julius CaesarRead
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event ... For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.
Walter LippmannRead
The sad truth is, there's more Walter White in me than I'd care to admit, because if I truly was as kind as people think I am, I wouldn't be able to write Walter White.
Vince GilliganRead
I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from the base-line - their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life.
Vandana ShivaRead
According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.
Gottfried LeibnizRead