I see as in a vision the dying spark of our council fires, the ashes cold and white. I see no longer the curling smoke rising from our lodge poles. I hear no longer the songs of the women as they prepare the meal. The antelope have gone; the buffalo wallows are empty. Only the wail of the coyote is heard... . We are like birds with a broken wing. My heart is cold within me. My eyes are growing dim-I am old.

The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brickheaps and the broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.

Yet there is a dignity in the human spirit which can become most clearly visible in the moment of defeat and disaster.

Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory.

Who, apart From ourselves, can see any difference between Our victories and our defeats?

After a couple of days and after a hundred coffees and a thousand cigarettes and a million words and quite a few lunchtime beers we were able to agree that we didn't know nothing.

There are defeats more triumphant than victories.

Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.

The important thing is to learn a lesson every time you lose.

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.