Life & Wisdom Quote by William Feather

Feather’s line is a polite grenade lobbed into the comfortable bunker of “realism.” It takes the familiar phrase “it can’t be done” and strips it of its alleged technical authority, recasting it as a character flaw. The move is sly: he doesn’t deny that some things are impossible; he demotes most impossibility claims to something more mundane and more indicting - reluctance. In one sentence, “can’t” becomes “won’t,” and the alibi collapses.

The specific intent is motivational, but not the syrupy kind. Feather is diagnosing a social habit: we outsource our fear of effort, embarrassment, or failure into the language of objective constraints. “Cannot” sounds like physics; “unwilling” sounds like choice. He’s arguing that the barrier is usually not the world’s hard limit, but our soft avoidance - the desire to preserve energy, status, or innocence. That’s why the statistic lands. “Ninety-nine out of one-hundred” isn’t a survey; it’s a provocation, a way of saying: if you’re claiming impossibility, you’re probably lying to yourself.

Context matters. Feather wrote in an America that fetishized self-improvement and invention, where the mythology of progress depended on treating obstacles as psychological puzzles. The subtext flatters and challenges the reader at once: you have more agency than you admit, and your excuses are detectable. It’s a rebuke aimed less at engineers than at bystanders - the people who call something “impossible” mainly because they don’t want to be the one to try.