Eighty Percent of Success is Showing Up Quiz

Answer: Abe Lincoln

Other wise men have addressed the perils of power similarly. Lord Acton (1778-1834) famously said, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

William Pitt (1708-1778), the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, opined "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the mind of those who possess it." The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1782-1822) addressed the dangers of power in 1813, writing, "Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate'er it touches.

Answer: Sir Winston Churchill

Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), citing an unsourced aphorism, also said of democracy in a 1947 speech to the House of Commons that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Source: "Churchill Speaks 1897-1963: Collected Speeches in Peace & War," Edited by Robert Rhodes James, M.P., 1998.

Answer: Tom Clancy

Authors Dan Brown, John Grisham and Jo Nesbo are all still alive and writing. Brown and Grisham are American; Nesbo is Norwegian. Acclaimed for his post Cold War spy novels, Tom Clancy passed away in October 2013 at the age of sixty-six. More than one hundred million copies of Clancy's books are still in print.

Answer: Hector Berlioz

French composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) is the only one of the choices to have been a nineteenth century man. Woodrow Wilson served as the president of the United States from 1913 until 1921; inventor Thomas Edison lived until 1931. Berlioz composed his most important works in the mid 1800s. He died in Paris at the age of sixty-six.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

Unlike the other choices, British writer Rudyard Kipling was not associated with drug usage. It was his belief though that words could have much the same effect on people that drugs have. This quotation is from a speech he made in 1923 to the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Kipling was opining on the potent effect words have to influence people and change the ways they think, feel and act.

Answer: Margaret Thatcher (UK)

Margaret Roberts Thatcher (1925-2013), popularly known as the "Iron Lady," was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990.

Source for this quotation: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition., p. 756.

Answer: Edith Wharton

Hemingway and Fitzgerald both ultimately returned to the United States from living abroad and were buried in their native land. Pound was buried in Venice, Italy. Only Wharton, who had moved to France around 1910, continued to reside there until her death at seventy-five. She is interred at the Cimetière des Gonards, in Versailles, France.

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

The Hemingway quotation is taken from his 1932 non-fiction work, "Death in the Afternoon," in which he deconstructs the traditions and rituals of Spanish bullfighting. For Hemingway, bullfighting was a metaphor for the writer's search for meaning in a random world.

Answer: Oscar Wilde

Once the "toast of the town" in London, Wilde was jailed in 1895 as a "sodomite" for his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Released in 1897 he emigrated to France, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in a Paris hotel room in November 1900 - age 46.

His last words were..."Either this wallpaper goes or I do." Over the ensuing years his reputation as a playwright, novelist, essayist, poet and notorious wit has been restored. Alexander Pope was an eighteenth century English writer, Robert Louis Stevenson was a nineteenth century Scottish writer, and Dylan Thomas was a twentieth century Welsh writer.

Answer: Prince Philip

The source for this quotation is an article that appeared in the "Daily Mail", 10 June 2011, titled "As Prince Philip Turns 90, Relive Some of his Most Hilarious Gaffes." See section "On Women."