The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life, but it admits of others which sometimes may very considerably assist its work and even requires certain kinds of government action. But there is good reason why the negative requirements, the points where coercion must not be used, have been particularly stressed.
~ Friedrich Hayek
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There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
~ Henry James
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People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subjects, which it is up to the writer to find.
~ Wilfrid Sheed
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Our lives are shaped by networks: of family, friends, and colleagues, or the wider ones that encompass neighbors and fellow citizens. We exist in relation to others. And yet novels, beginning almost as soon as Don Quixote set out on his quest, have long fixated on the individual as a shaper of his or her fate, as the fundamental unit for a story. The individual acts or is acted upon, and narrative results from this tension.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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Thoughts left unsaid are never wasted.
~ Henry S. Haskins
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History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.
~ Alexis de Tocqueville
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Whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise.
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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In every war zone that I’ve been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought.
~ John le Carré
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Woodrow Wilson was the first world leader to perceive security as a benefit that could be shared by like-minded nations. Until then, each great power had clambered over others to field bigger armies, float bigger navies, and accumulate more colonies. This competition had culminated in the disastrous outbreak of the Great War. Wilson glimpsed the possibility of a different way: that shared values might provide a more stable basis for peace among advanced nations than the quest for military dominance.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Agreeable as it is to know where one is proceeding, it is far more important to know where one has arrived.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith
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