[quotes] Gilead - Marilynne Robinson 2004

 

"If you're a grown man when you read this - it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then - I'll have been gone a long time. I'll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I'll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things."

"... and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent."

"So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. That's what he always to be, at any rate."

"We'd go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren't many."

"You may not remember me at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."

"But in fact one lapse in judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible."

"I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life."

"These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice."

"I never dared to ask him what he'd been up to. I couldn't risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions."

"It was kindly intended, but not considerate, I understand that."

"Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience... How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance to we perform it?"

"... she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me."

"I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am."

"Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."

"... just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with."

"I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back."

"How could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me?"

"... and he would protect him like a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having."

"They mattered or they didn't and that's the end of it."

"Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view."

"I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love - I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence."

[quotes] The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan 1989

 

"And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English."

"In me, they see their own daughters, just as arrogant, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English."

"I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother."

"It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish to think she could use faith to change fate."

"And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation."

"And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so I could shout back and blame her for all my misery."

"But my therapist said, Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it's all diminishing returns after a certain age."

"The power of my words was that strong."

"That's the way Chinese mothers show they love their children, not through hugs and kisses but with stern offerings of steamed dumplings, duck's gizzards, and crab."

"Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever."

"Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth."

"It's my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?"

"In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you."

[quotes] The Wise Man's Fear - Patrick Ruthfuss 2011

"That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink."

"It's like Teccam said, nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth."

[quotes] The Name of the Wind - Patrich Rothfuss 2008

"Lovely as the moon: not flawless, perhaps, but perfect."

"We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be."

[quotes] The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. - Ed. Clayborne Carson 1998

"I have never experienced the feeling of not having the basic necessities of life. These things were always provided by a father who always put his family first."

"But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being. I had always been the questioning and precocious type."

"I would end up having to go to the back of that bus with my body, but every time I got on that bus I left my mind up on the front seat. And I said to myself, 'One of these days I'm going to put my body up there where my mind is."

"It is my conviction that the minister must somehow take profound theological and philosophical views and place them in a concrete framework. I must forever make the complex the simple."

"Above all, I see the preaching ministry as a dual process. On the one hand I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change."

"...the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their right with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth."

"And as I watched them I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity."

"I soon saw that I was the victim of an unwarranted pessimism because I had started out with an unwarranted optimism."

"Those who had previously trembled before the law were now proud to be arrested for the cause of freedom."

"What the opposition failed to see was that our mutual suffering had wrapped us all in a single garment of destiny. What happened to one happened to all."

"Often the path to freedom will carry you through prison."

"The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor."

"Our ultimate aim was not to defeat or humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding. We had a moral obligation to remind him that segregation is wrong. We protested with the ultimate aim of being reconciled with our white brothers."

"But I had to look at something else beyond the man - the people who surrounded him - and I felt that Kennedy was surrounded by better people. It was on that basis that I felt that Kennedy would make the best president."

"The people of Albany had straightened their backs, and, as Gandhi had said, no one can ride on the back of a man unless it is bent."

"The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people."

"There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face-to-face with himself and with ruthless reality. I was along in that crowded room."

"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

"...one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"

"I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends."

"A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institution is a revolution."

"American political thought was not committed to conservatism, nor radicalism, nor moderation. It was above all fluid. As such it contained trends rather than hard lines, and affirmative leadership could guide it into constructive channels."

"Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart."

"But then I realized that this was no mere recognition of the contribution of one man on the stage of history. It was a testimony to the magnificent drama of the civil rights movement and the thousands of actors who had played their roles extremely well. In truth, it is these 'noble' people who had won this Novel Prize."

"Racial justice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with his scientific progress. And, more importantly, he will had learned the practical art of living in harmony."

"Cities that had been citadels of the status quo became the unwilling birthplace of significant national legislation. Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960; Birmingham inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and Selma produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

"When all is finally entered into the annals of sociology; when philosophers, politicians, and preachers have all had their say, we must return to the fact that a person participates in this society primarily as an economic entity. At rock bottom we are neither poets, athletes, nor artists; our existence is centered in the fact that we are consumers, because we first must eat and have shelter to life."

"I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness."

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

"I refuse to determine what is right by taking a Gallup poll of the trends of the time. I imagine that there were leaders in Germany who sincerely opposed what Hitler was doing to the Jews. But they took their poll and discovered that anti-Semitism was the prevailing trend. In order to 'be in step with the times,' in order to 'keep in touch,' they yielded to one of the most ignominious evils that history has ever known."

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triples of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

"On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' And Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But Conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, not politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right."

"If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, it I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain."

[quotes] The Knowledge Illusion - Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach 2017

"Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind."

"We all suffer, from a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meager."

"Our skulls may delimit the frontiers of our brains, but they do not delimit the frontier of our knowledge."

"Looking closer at things just raises more questions. There is always more to understand."

"... It's about what causes people to act and how you can modify their motivations, to make them think they're doing something for a different reason than they initially thought."

"When a community agrees to buy into a particular story, they are accepting the attitude implied by the story."

"My ability to act doesn't depend on the knowledge that happens to be in my head at a given moment; it depends on what knowledge I can access when I need it."

"The curse of knowledge is that we tend to think what is in our heads is in the heads of others. In the knowledge illusion, we tend to think what is in others' heads is in our heads. In both cases, we fail to discern who knows what."

"Each of us has our little window on the world, a little bit of knowledge that we have access to."

"We may individually suffer from the knowledge illusion, but the expertise that's present in a crowd can overcome individual biases."

"The power that culture has over cognition just swamps these attempts at education."

"Apparently, the fact that a strong majority of people has some preference does not mean that their opinion is informed."

"... great philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell said, 'The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists.'"

"Getting people to think beyond their own interests and experiences may be necessary for reducing their hubris and thereby reducing polarization."

"... thinking through the consequences of a policy is hard - very hard. It's much easier just to hide one's ignorance in a veil of platitudes about sacred values."

"... people are less inclined to seek new information after finding out they were wrong. Causal explanation is an effective way to shatter the illusion, but people don't like having their illusion shattered."

"A good leader must be able to help people realize their ignorance without making them feel stupid."

"The idolization of individuals, as well as our corresponding failure to appreciate the role of the communities they represent, is more than just a ruse to simplify complex histories. The images we retain of these individuals shape how we think about the events they participated in."

"Understanding where you fit requires understanding not only what you know but also what others know that you don't."

"In every domain of life, knowledge is interdependent. The knowledge that I'm legally responsible for is not necessarily in my head."

"Learning and performance benefit from having a greater range of expertise. Having a diverse group of people of different backgrounds, classes, genders, and races can only increase that range."

"The big lesson of the nudge approach is that it is easier and more effective to change the environment than it is to change the person."

[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."

[quotes] A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking 1988

 

"At early times the universe would probably be in a disordered state. This would mean that disorder would decrease with time. You would see broken cups gathering themselves together and jumping back onto the table. However, any human beings who were observing the cups would be living in a universe in which disorder decreased with time. I shall argue that such beings would have a psychological arrow of time that was backwards. That is, they would remember events in the future, and not remember events in their past. When the cup was broken, they would remember it being on the table, but when it was on the table, they would not remember it being on the floor."