Success Quote by George Canning

“Indecision and delays are the parents of failure” carries the clipped authority of a man who spent his life watching events punish hesitation. Canning wasn’t a salon moralist; he was a British statesman navigating war, empire, and parliamentary knife-fights where timing could decide whether a policy lived, died, or exploded into scandal. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that failure is usually caused by bad luck or bad enemies. Canning pins it on something more intimate: the self-inflicted lag between knowing and doing.

The phrasing is strategic. “Parents” smuggles in inevitability and responsibility at once. Failure isn’t an accident; it’s raised. Indecision is the internal culprit (the mind dithering, the coalition splintering, the leader avoiding blame). Delays are the external expression of that weakness (committees, consultations, procedural fog). Put together, they create a genealogy of collapse that feels both moral and managerial: you don’t just lose, you gestate loss.

The subtext is political realism. In government, “waiting” is rarely neutral; it’s a choice to let others set the agenda. Delay gives opponents time to organize, markets time to sour, crises time to harden into narratives. Canning’s Britain was learning, in real time, that power was increasingly about speed: moving before the window closes, before the public mood turns, before Parliament or Europe reshuffles the board.

It’s also a warning about optics. Indecision reads as weakness; delay reads as incompetence. Even when prudence is warranted, a leader who cannot act decisively invites the very failure they claim to be preventing.