Success Quote by Anthony Burgess

Boldness here isn’t a romantic flourish; it’s a managerial ethic dressed as a rallying cry. Burgess frames “bold, persistent, experimentation” as both necessity and mandate, then quickly narrows the idea of courage into something almost bureaucratic: try a method, measure it, confess failure, iterate. The rhetoric works because it yokes two impulses that usually fight each other in public life - the appetite for decisive leadership and the reality that most decisions are guesses. By calling experimentation “common sense,” Burgess strips the word of its lab-coat elitism and rebrands it as plain citizenship.

The subtext is a rebuke to the national addiction to certainty. “Unless I mistake its temper” is the sly pressure point: he’s reading the room, but he’s also daring the room to live up to the self-image it claims. A country that “demands” boldness can’t then punish the visible mess of trial and error. The line “admit it frankly” is the real tell. It anticipates the political theater where failure must be denied, rebranded, or blamed elsewhere. Burgess insists that honesty about what didn’t work is not weakness but the price of progress.

Context matters because this is a novelist speaking like a civic strategist. Burgess knew systems - governments, schools, moral codes - are narratives people cling to even when they stop fitting. His closing command, “But above all, try something,” lands like impatience with paralysis-by-analysis: better an imperfect action than a perfect alibi.