All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

The line expresses a bleak, leveling view of human endeavor: whatever people do—heroic or petty, altruistic or selfish—actions tend to converge in their ultimate insignificance when measured against time, chance, and mortality. Calling actions “equivalent” suggests that outcomes often erase moral or practical distinctions, while “doomed to failure” frames failure not as a personal defect but as a structural condition of human projects: plans decay, institutions collapse, and even successes are temporary. Read this way, the quote can be taken as existential or fatalistic, yet it can also imply a kind of freedom—if failure is inevitable, one may act for principle, integrity, or meaning rather than for guaranteed results.