One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals. - Michael Korda

In America, success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement that matters.

The first step to success is to accept the consequences of knowing that you're right, when that is the case. It is not so much a matter of being assertive, as of giving up the comfortable cocoon of apologies and guilt in which most of us have chosen to live.

• It's O.K. to be ambitious. • It's O.K. to look out for Number One. … • It's O.K. to be a winner. • And it's always O.K. to be rich. A word of caution: people will tell you that success can't buy you happiness. This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.