Roger Bannister Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must move faster than the lion or it will not survive. Every morning a lion wakes up and it knows it must move faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn't matter if you are the lion or the gazelle, when the sun comes up, you better be moving.

I suppose the fundamental distinction between Shakespeare and myself is one of treatment. We get our effects differently. Take the familiar farcical situation of someone who suddenly discovers that something unpleasant is standing behind them. Here is how Shakespeare handles it in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3: ANTIGONUS: Farewell! A lullaby too rough. I never saw the heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the chase: I am gone for ever. And then comes literature's most famous stage direction, "Exit pursued by a bear." All well and good, but here's the way I would handle it: BERTIE: Touch of indigestion, Jeeves? JEEVES: No, Sir. BERTIE: Then why is your tummy rumbling? JEEVES: Pardon me, Sir, the noise to which you allude does not emanate from my interior but from that of that animal that has just joined us. BERTIE: Animal? What animal? JEEVES: A bear, Sir. If you will turn your head, you will observe that a bear is standing in your immediate rear inspecting you in a somewhat menacing manner. BERTIE (as narrator): I pivoted the loaf. The honest fellow was perfectly correct. It was a bear. And not a small bear, either. One of the large economy size. Its eye was bleak and it gnashed a tooth or two, and I could see at a g. that it was going to be difficult for me to find a formula. "Advise me, Jeeves," I yipped. "What do I do for the best?" JEEVES: I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, Sir. BERTIE (narrator): No sooner s. than d. I streaked for the horizon, closely followed across country by the dumb chum. And that, boys and girls, is how your grandfather clipped six seconds off Roger Bannister's mile. Who can say which method is superior?" (As reproduced in Plum, Shakespeare and the Cat Chap )

I’m never lonelier than when I’m in a crowded room, talking to nobody, awkward and isolated, trying to decide how to stand so I don’t appear as if I want to start Roger Bannistering a mile away from the networking event.

I would give you my grandma’s slow-knitted Duck Soup dance-routine recipe, but my grandpa sold it to Roger Bannister for three minutes and 59 seconds. I think he could have gotten 3:58 for it, if he’d have just gone the extra mile.

The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.

...it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see--that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this--at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow's Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his "Elegy," the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?

However ordinary each of us may seem, we are all in some way special, and can do things that are extraordinary, perhaps until then…even thought impossible.

There is a coming food shortage crisis, and so I started a duck farm. I can’t start one after everyone is starving. It has to be up and running like Roger Bannister.

It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ

I am the Mister Rogers Bannister of swimming coaches for ducks. My services are available in underwater vending machines in ponds all across The Ozarks.

Then I thought of an English middle-distance runner from back in the day named Roger Bannister. When Bannister was trying to break the four-minute mile in the 1950s, experts told him it couldn’t be done, but that didn’t stop him. He failed again and again, but he persevered, and when he ran his historic mile in 3:59.4 on May 6, 1954, he didn’t just break a record, he broke open the floodgates simply by proving it possible. Six weeks later, his record was eclipsed, and by now over 1,000 runners have done what was once thought to be beyond human capability.

One of the most extraordinary stories of reframing is that of Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes. Bannister was a medical school student who couldn’t afford a trainer or a special runner’s diet. He didn’t even have time to run more than thirty minutes a day, squeezed in around his medical studies. Yet Bannister did not focus on all the reasons why he logically had no chance of reaching his goal. He instead refocused on accomplishing his goal in his own way. On the morning he made world history, he got up, ate his usual breakfast, did his required hospital rounds, and then caught a bus to the track.

A brick could be used in a knee replacement surgery, to build back the wall separating man from a sub four-minute mile. Damn you, Roger Bannister!


I like my duck eggs runny, like Roger Bannister when he broke the four-minute mile barrier.

The moonlight filtered through the trees like water from a strainer. Agatha’s hair was the color and consistency of wet noodles. I said she might look sexy as a redhead, and she asserted she’d be staying a creamy alfredo. I touched her tight skin they way a drummer might strum a guitar. She called me Mozart, and I didn’t know how to reply so I simply belched. Before I had finished, her open mouth was on mine, and she was huffing my essence like David Hasselhoff hoofing it to the liquor store. I remember what color panties she wore. They were transparent with the texture of flesh. I rubbed her back while she purred. Her skin was as soft as a fur coat. We made love for what seemed like days, but was in fact 3:58.95—a personal best for me. I felt like Roger Bannister, and she felt like a cheetah. Literally. I told her she’d look good on my rug, as a rug, and she playfully pinched the folds on my stomach. She explored my naval cavity with her pinky, and what started out as foreplay turned into a scavenger hunt. While she might have expected to find lint, nobody could have ever suspected she’d find the lost Templar treasure.

Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior.

Roger Bannister’s 4-minute mile run is the classic example. In 1954, he broke the misguided, but common belief that it was

Bannister's mile remains a touchstone in the history of athletics not because Bannister set an unbreachable record - currently, the fastest mile is a good fifteen seconds under Bannister's. For generations, four minutes was thought to represent an intrinsic physiological limit, as if muscles could inherently not be made to move any faster or lungs breathe any deeper. What Bannister proved was that such notions about intrinsic boundaries are mythical. What he broke permanently was not a limit, but the idea of limits.

Roger Bannister.

Who’s Sir Roger Bannister?” asked Sydney. “A prominent neurologist who also happened to be the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes,” Monty answered.

At one point in this book, Clarke abruptly asked a rather existential question: “What is Daenerys?” One might ask the same of the show. What is Game of Thrones? There are many correct answers: an adaptation, a TV series, a fantasy story, a corporate enterprise, a snapshot of the entertainment world during seismic industry and cultural transitions. I saw the show as a seemingly impossible dream made real. Game of Thrones was the filmic equivalent of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile—proof that with enough determination and sacrifice, a creative human endeavor can portray even the most expansive outer reaches of our storytelling imagination and, in doing so, captivate the world.

We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes,” chides Nietzsche. “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition.” Breaking the four-minute mile demanded the superior abilities of Roger Bannister coupled with intense, painful training. Endless hours of excruciating self-denial went into Michelangelo’s adornment of the Sistine Chapel. The glories of the pyramids were made possible by the relentless cruelty of slave labor. Such is the cost of all human greatness. It pays in the coin of pain, and hence greatness itself would be destroyed by maximizing pleasure and comfort and treating pain itself as simply evil.

To move into the lead means making an act requiring fierceness and confidence,” Roger Bannister once noted. “But fear must play some part … no relaxation is possible, and all discretion is thrown to the wind.

Who’s Sir Roger Bannister?” asked Sydney. “A prominent neurologist who also happened to be the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes,” Monty answered. “He set the mark just down the street at Iffley Road Track after spending the morning doing his rounds as a med student at St. Mary’s Hospital.

Ann knew she needed more than willpower: she needed fear. Once she was out front, every cracking twig would spur her toward the finish. “To move into the lead means making an act requiring fierceness and confidence,” Roger Bannister once noted. “But fear must play some part … no relaxation is possible, and all discretion is thrown to the wind.

The worst thing that ever happened to British athletics was Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile barrier.

Kasparov. En el Campeonato Mundial de Ajedrez de 1990, Kasparov hizo un movimiento terrible y perdió a su reina al comienzo de una partida decisiva. Los grandes maestros del ajedrez alrededor del mundo soltaron un quejido de dolor; el chico malo de los tableros moría atropellado en la carretera (un periodista del New York Times menos elegante dejó ver una sonrisa sarcástica). Pero no había sido un error; Kasparov había sacrificado deliberadamente su pieza más poderosa a cambio de una ventaja psicológica aún más poderosa. Cuando se encontraba acorralado y la situación necesitaba una acción desesperada, Kasparov era letal. Su oponente, Anatoly Karpov, un jugador que seguía el manual al pie de la letra, era demasiado conservador para presionarlo al comienzo de la partida, así que Kasparov se había tirado la presión encima él mismo, abriendo con un Gambito de Dama. Y ganó. Eso era lo que Ann estaba haciendo. En lugar de perseguir a los tarahumaras, decidió apostar por la peligrosa e inspirada estrategia de dejar que los tarahumaras la persiguieran a ella. ¿Quién está más comprometido con la victoria al final: el depredador o la presa? El león puede perder y volver a cazar al día siguiente, pero el antílope solo puede equivocarse una vez. Para vencer a los tarahumaras, Ann sabía que necesitaba más que fuerza de voluntad: necesitaba sentir miedo. Una vez que se colocó delante, cada ramita quebrada la empujaría hasta la meta. «Colocarse al frente implica realizar un maniobra que requiere ferocidad y confianza —anotó una vez Roger Bannister—. Pero el miedo debe jugar una parte… no es posible relajarse y cualquier miramiento debe lanzarse por la ventana.» Ann tenía ferocidad y confianza de sobra. Ahora estaba ahogando los miramientos y dejando que el miedo cumpliera su labor. La ultramaratón estaba por presenciar su primer Gambito de Dama.

dejar de ser consciente de mi movimiento, descubrí una nueva unión con la naturaleza. Había encontrado una nueva fuente de poder y de belleza, una fuente cuya existencia nunca imaginé. ROGER BANNISTER, al superar la barrera de los cuatro minutos por milla.

Para dimensionar o impacto das crenças, vamos usar como exemplo Roger Bannister, que quebrou o recorde de correr uma milha em menos de 4 minutos. Até aquele momento, se pensava que era fisicamente impossível para um homem correr esta distância em menos de 4 minutos. Roger passou 9 anos se preparando e foram muitas tentativas fracassadas, até que, finalmente, conseguiu diminuir esse tempo, em maio de 1945. No entanto, tão impossível como parecia inicialmente, a barreira dos 4 minutos foi quebrada novamente apenas 6 semanas depois, e depois, nos próximos 9 anos, mais de 200 pessoas quebraram esse recorde. A crença de que era algo impossível mudou.