Admiral Stockdale Quotes

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale’s story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full (1998).52

Surely, then, mere style, or language, never was, as it never could, naturally, it never could, possibly be praised, by well-informed readers; by them, the poet's manner of expressing his ideas is admired, only as the vigorous, and splendid nature of those ideas give it a dignity, and lustre. A style deserves no commendation which is not impregnated with the spirit of genius; if it is not actuated, and burnished with that spirit, it must always be feeble, and lifeless, like its weak, and presumptuous authour. Infinitely various are the powers, and display of the human mind: sometimes a nervous, nay, a great writer, in his ardent intellectual progress, will be negligent of the style, or manner in which he expresses his thoughts; but still, aided by that ardour, even his negligent strokes will hit you; even in his roughness you will feel an interest. This is another proof, if another proof was wanting, that it is thought which gives a commanding character, and authority to style; and that style will attract, and fix, and gratify our attention; even when it is thrown out by a careless vigour.

Stockdale Paradox This finding is named after Admiral James Stockdale, winner of the Medal of Honor, who survived seven years in a Vietcong POW camp by hanging on to two contradictory beliefs: His life couldn’t be worse at the moment, and his life would someday be better than ever. Like Stockdale, people at the good-to-great companies in our research confronted the most brutal facts of their current reality, yet simultaneously maintained absolute faith that they would prevail in the end. And they held both disciplines—faith and facts—at the same time, all the time.