“The vast majority of my teenage feelings of hopelessness and despair were related to the feeling of my mother that she can cut hair.”
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Category Archives: Quotes
Quote: Lillian Carter
I know folks all have a tizzy about it, but I like a little bourbon of an evening. It helps me sleep. I don’t much care what they say about it.
“These capitalists who are desperate to elect Republicans should study their history books.”
Charlie Rose Talks to Jeremy Grantham [Businessweek]
History speaks pretty clearly that the markets do better with Democrats. Republicans’ ideas of what constitutes fiscal responsibility simply are not good for the stock market. Democrats have many tendencies, but one of them is to look after the workers, and actually that tends to be good for demand and good for markets. These capitalists who are desperate to elect Republicans should study their history books.
—Jeremy Grantham, co-founder, GMO asset management.
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.”
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
From The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934.
Quote: Barry Ritholtz
JPMorgan’s debacle, and its parallels to AIG [WaPo]
Consider any major finance disaster of the past 30 years, and what you will invariably see is the result of trying to spin dross into gold. The magic of finance is that this can work for a while. The reality of finance is simple mathematics. Eventually, the probabilities play themselves out and the dice come up snake eyes.
Quote: Frank Zappa
If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.
Advice like this really never gets old.
Quote: Ezra Klein
The Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) on the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement:
These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution. They’re small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it. Or, worse, they have tens of thousands in debt to show for it…
This is why I’m taking Occupy Wall Street — or, perhaps more specifically, the ‘We Are The 99 Percent’ movement — seriously. There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium…
What gives their movement the potential for power and potency is the masses who just want the system to work the way they were promised it would work. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans are really struggling. It’s not that 99 percent of Americans want a revolution. It’s that 99 percent of Americans sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy — work hard, play by the rules, get ahead — has been broken, and they want to see it restored.
[WaPost, via Felix Salmon]
Quote: Steve Jobs
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
—Apple founder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) in the Commencement address delivered at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.
Quote: William Gibson
Before you diagnose yourself with depression and low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
Gibson got it all right.
Quote: Elizabeth Warren
Former White House advisor for the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren on fair taxation:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own – nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory – and hire someone to protect against this – because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless – keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Forget the upcoming election battle. This is spot on and I could not agree with her more.