"We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist"
About this Quote
The phrasing is strategically absolutist. “Not interested” sounds almost bored, as if defeat is a trivial distraction beneath the attention of power. Then the second sentence escalates from attitude to ontology: “They do not exist.” That’s propaganda at its most elegant, converting a contingent future into an impossibility. It’s a psychological maneuver aimed at subordinates and adversaries alike: for insiders, it disciplines doubt; for outsiders, it projects inevitability. If defeat is unthinkable, wavering becomes disloyalty.
The context is a 19th-century Britain increasingly defined by imperial confidence, industrial capacity, and the moral self-justifications that accompanied expansion. The Victorian state needed narratives of permanence to paper over the costs: colonial resistance, domestic unrest, the fragility beneath grandeur. The quote works because it performs certainty rather than argues for it. It doesn’t persuade through evidence; it recruits through posture, using royal voice to make confidence feel like destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Never Give Up |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, Volume 3 (Queen Victoria, 1931)
Evidence: Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist. (Page 191). The earliest primary-source-based attribution I could verify is not in a speech or published work by Queen Victoria herself, but as a quoted letter/message to A. J. Balfour during the Boer War ('Black Week,' December 1899), as reproduced in Lady Gwendolen Cecil's biography of her father, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. Multiple later secondary works point specifically to Cecil, vol. 3, p. 191, and identify it as a message to Balfour. I could verify the bibliographic existence of the 1931 volume and the page citation, but I could not directly inspect the scanned page image itself in this session. Because of that, this is likely the first published source currently traceable online, but not necessarily the original manuscript letter. If your standard for 'original source' means Victoria's own surviving letter manuscript, that remains unverified here. Other candidates (1) A Short History of England (Reginald James White, 1967) compilation95.0% Reginald James White. commandos of Boer farmers that caused Queen Victoria to tell Mr Balfour : ' Please understand t... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Victoria, Queen. (2026, March 7). We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-not-interested-in-the-possibilities-of-15478/
Chicago Style
Victoria, Queen. "We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist." FixQuotes. March 7, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-not-interested-in-the-possibilities-of-15478/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist." FixQuotes, 7 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-not-interested-in-the-possibilities-of-15478/. Accessed 31 Mar. 2026.











