Browsing Quotes, page 2
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If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
Speaker: Dorothy ParkerPosted: 24 Dec 2014 at 9:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
Speaker: John DeweyPosted: 24 Dec 2014 at 9:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
...And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by. But with far more subtlety does this mischief insinuate itself into philosophy and the sciences; in which the first conclusion colors and brings into conformity with itself all that come after, though far sounder and better. Besides, independently of that delight and vanity which I have described, it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed toward both alike. Indeed, in the establishment of any true axiom, the negative instance is the more forcible of the two.Speaker: Francis BaconSource: Novum OrganumPosted: 11 Dec 2014 at 1:16 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The ways we miss our lives are life.
Speaker: Randall JarrellSource: A Girl in a LibraryPosted: 11 Nov 2014 at 9:49 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Failure is the condiment that gives success it’s flavor.
Speaker: Truman CapotePosted: 11 Nov 2014 at 9:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
Speaker: Thomas EdisonPosted: 11 Nov 2014 at 9:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
In our hearts, we want to believe in – and would choose – great accomplishment and virtue. That’s why our lies, particularly to ourselves, are so beautiful.
Speaker: Brandon SandersonSource: The Way of KingsPosted: 11 Nov 2014 at 9:34 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
whenever there are some people calling for the elimination of the class that lives by collecting interest, there will be others to object that this will destroy the livelihood of widows and pensioners.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
[The] great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The one thing that’s clear is that new ideas won’t emerge without the jettisoning of much of our accustomed categories of thought— which have become mostly sheer dead weight, if not intrinsic parts of the very apparatus of hopelessness—and formulating new ones. This is why I spent so much of this book talking about the market, but also about the false choice between state and market that so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:36 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.
Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, it’s still largely up to us to determine how it’s going to turn out. For instance: the last time we shifted from a bullion economy to one of virtual credit money, at the end of the Axial Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages, the immediate shift was experienced largely as a series of great catastrophes. Will it be the same this time around? Presumably a lot depends on how consciously we set out to ensure that it won’t be.Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Just as the United States had managed to largely get rid of the problem of political corruption by making the bribery of legislators effectively legal (it was redefined as “lobbying”), so the problem of loan-sharking was brushed aside by making real interest rates of 25 percent, 50 percent, or even in some cases (for instance for payday loans) 120 percent annually, once typical only of organized crime, perfectly legal — and therefore, enforceable no longer by just hired goons and the sort of people who place mutilated animals on their victims’ doorsteps, but by judges, lawyers, bailiffs, and police.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.
Speaker: John Maynard KeynesSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Free your mind of the idea of deserving, of the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
Speaker: Ursula K. Le GuinSource: The DispossessedPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:30 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Capitalism is a system that enshrines the gambler as an essential part of its operation, in a way that no other ever has.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Such imaginary constructs are of course what scientists refer to as “models,” and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with them. Actually I think a fair case can be made that we cannot think without them. The problem with such models — at least, it always seems to happen when we model something called “the market” — is that, once created, we have a tendency to treat them as objective realities, or even fall down before them and start worshiping them as gods. “We must obey the dictates of the market!”
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:29 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Christians are rare people on earth. This is why the world needs a strict, harsh temporal government which will compel and constrain the wicked to refrain from theft and robbery, and to return what they borrow (although a Christian ought neither to demand nor expect it). This is necessary in order that the world may not become a desert, peace vanish, and men’s trade and society be utterly destroyed; all of which would happen if we were to rule the world according to the gospel, rather than driving and compelling the wicked by laws and the use of force to do and to allow what is right.
Speaker: Martin LutherSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison.
Speaker: David GraeberSource: Debt: The First 5,000 YearsPosted: 10 Nov 2014 at 11:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!
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