[quotes] Pachinko - Min Jin Lee 2017

 

"If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie was this steady, beating organ."

"Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well. What was most disappointing to him was when a person turned out to be no different than the next."

"'Most people are rotten everywhere you go. They're no good. You want to see a bad man?  Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let's see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.'"

"He had become almost inured to death; his frailty had reinforced his conviction that he must do something of consequence while he had the time."

"'One bad Korean ruins it for thousands of others. And one bad Christian hurts tens of thousands of Christians everywhere, especially in a nation of unbelievers.'"

"Yoseb would have crawled on his belly across the floor of the station if that would have made Isak free. Their eldest brother, Samoel, had been the brave one, the one who would've confronted the officers with audacity and grace, but Yoseb knew he was no hero [...] Yoseb didn't understand the point of anyone dying for his country or for some greater ideal. He understood survival and family."

"Save your family. Feed your belly. Pay attention, and be skeptical of the people in charge."

"Without the others around, it was possible to be kind to her son. Parents weren't supposed to praise their children, she knew this - it would only invite disaster."

"The factory owner believed that if all Asian countries were run with a kind of Japanese efficiency, attention to detail, and high level of organization, Asia as a whole would prosper and rise - able to defeat the unscrupulous West."

"Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism. But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much."

"'Although, if you like everything you read, I can't take you seriously. Perhaps you didn't think about these books long enough.'"

"she would not believe that she was no different than her parents, that seeing him as only Korean - good or bad - was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She would not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human."

"He would not understand. Her son could not feel compassion for those who did not try."

"the players also came to escape the eerily quiet streets where few said hello, to keep away from the loveless homes where wives slept with children instead of husbands, and to avoid the overheated rush-hour train cars where it was okay to push but not okay to talk to strangers."

"'People are awful. Drink some beer'"

"Etsuko Nagatomi loved all three of her children, but she did not love them all the same. Being a mother had taught her that this kind of emotional injustice was perhaps inevitable."

"her ex-husband used to dismiss this idea of fate as a lazy explanation for the bad choices people made. Regardless, life had only confirmed her belief that there was indeed a pattern to it all."

"There were so many errors. If life allowed revisions, she would let them stay in their baths a little longer, read them one more story before bed, and fix them another plate of shrimp."

"'I have never been to Japan [...] but I hope that wherever I am in life and whatever I do, I can be a good Japanese. I hope to never bring shame to my people.'"

"The Japanese said that Koreans had too much heat in their blood. Seeds, blood. How could you fight such hopeless ideas? Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe in such cruel ideas."

"'So then success tax comes from envy, and the shit tax comes from exploitation. Okay [...] then what's the mediocre tax?' [...] 'Good question, young Jedi. The tax for being mediocre comes from you and everyone else knowing that you are mediocre. It's a heavier tax than you'd think.'"

[quotes] The Year of Living Danishly - Helen Russell 2015

 

"It's not just Prius drivers, help-fans and hipsters who are passionate about the environment in Denmark. Being eco-friendly here is seen as a basic duty and something you do to be a part of Danish society."

"You know you're going to get taxed a lot anyway, so you may as well just focus on doing what you love, rather than what's going to land you a massive salary."

"'A fear of God isn't included in the Danish version of the Protestant religion,' explains Pernille."

"The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society's tendency towards religion - so that poorer countries tend to be more religious. The one exception tot the rule? America."

"Not long ago we [women] were second-rate citizens. We have to stay alert and be aware not to fall into old patterns. It's a big problem when young women - and men - don't have the historical perspective and mistakenly think that they're 'free' to do what they want, without seeing the structural and cultural forces that are still at work."

"Growing up in a female-centric bubble of delusion was a distinct advantage - it never occurred to me that I couldn't do absolutely anything."

"Danish preteens cover homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality and as the first country in the world to recognize registered partnerships for same-sex couples and the first European country to allow legal changes to gender without sterilization, Denmark has long placed an emphasis on inclusion."

"It's a bit like the school system and even the job market here - the individual has freedom within safe boundaries."

"One you trust 'the system' and can get your head around the fact that it's not trying to screw you over, it's easier to pay your taxes with grace 0 safe in the knowledge that the money is going to a good place."

"Danes want to be thought of as tolerant - it's important to them. And so The Danish Way is slowly adapting to incorporate new influences and arrivals."

[quotes] Lost Decades: the Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery - Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden 2011

  

"Republicans cut taxes to create deficits that restrained their opponents."

"Foreign borrowing, like any borrowing, makes sense if the borrowed money is used productively."

"Foreign debts made the good times better; they made the bad times worse."

"Facing a trade-off between recession now versus recession later makes the choice easy: you're in office now, somebody else will be in office later."

"Greater risks get lenders additional return on each dollar's investments. Leverage augmented this increased appetite for risk: owners of highly leveraged financial institutions have less of their own money at stake. If something goes wrong and the firm goes under, its owners' downside losses are limited to their own capital."

"As complexity grew, transparency declined. With each additional layer of securitization, it became more and more difficult to figure out the real worth of a given security, and in particular how risky it might be."

"A bank that is facing liquidity problems is out of ready cash; a bank that is insolvent is out of business."

"There are times when, in order to protect the innocent, society has to bail out the guilty, and this crisis was one of those times."

"Ironically, one of the principal results of the debt crisis [in Latin America] was a wave of democratization."

"Outrage grew apace, as the government threw hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money into bailing out some of those most responsible for the crisis, while the culprits continued to pay themselves huge bonuses."

"Merrill Lynch lost $27.6 billion in 2008, collapsed spectacularly, had to be bought by Bank of America, and was rescued with $10 billion in federal money; yet at the end of that disastrous year, its management approved bonuses of $3.6 billion."

"All of these reasons to worry about chronic, large-scale deficits are subsumed by the most important reason: they impose massive costs on future generations, who did nothing to incur them. Excessive borrowing now means that our descendants inherit a smaller capital stock and a smaller economy."

"Meanwhile, the country's taxpayers appear unwilling to accept that higher taxes are the price a society pays for the programs it adopts."

"National policies to address desperate national conditions ended up imposing costs on other countries - not on purpose, but as an unintended consequence of measures undertaken in grave circumstances under serious political stress."

"The danger [to globalization] is not a sudden plunge into trade wars, but a gradual erosion of support for compromise with commercial and financial partners, a gradual decline in patterns of cooperation and collaboration."

"John Maynard Keynes is said to have remarked, 'If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.' The same is true of countries: debtors can hold their creditors hostage just as surely as the other way around."

"A government (or firm, or household) does not impose externalities on others on purpose; they are an inadvertent result of self-interested behavior that does not take the well-being of neighbors into account."

"In both [the US and China], clearly, it's the producers who dominate currency politics; consumers are too disparate a group to play an organized role."

"But conscientious politicians have a duty to use their access to greater information and greater authority to avoid policy traps, not to exploit them."

"Americans need to decide which services they want their government to deliver and then pay for those services."

"Because the government taxes income rather than consumption, it makes consuming today more attractive than saving for the future."

"Institutions too big to fail create the possibility of 'private profits and socialized losses.'"

"Americans face a serious economic challenge. They lost the first decade of the century to a boom that enriched the wealthiest, and a subsequent bust that impoverished the rest."

"it is the job of policymakers to make difficult choices, informed by knowledge and understanding that the average citizen does not have."