In modern office life, our efforts rarely generate an immediate reward. When we answer an e-mail or attend a meeting, we’re typically advancing, in fits and starts, long-term projects that may be weeks or months away from completion. The modern knowledge worker also tends to juggle many different objectives at the same time, moving rapidly back and forth between them throughout the day.
~ Cal Newport via The New Yorker
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The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, can’t easily separate the two. All of it—wages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flag—can be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain?
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities.
~ Cormac McCarthy
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God didn’t die, he was transformed into money.
~ Giorgio Agamben
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Higher education is facing a crisis of public trust. The simple fact of the matter is, fewer and fewer Americans believe that universities are committed to the pursuit of truth. Understanding why isn’t hard at a time when elite institutions make excuses for illiberal mobs. The perception that ideologues and fanatics are running the show on campus is, sadly, based in reality. The public sees it. Donors see it. Boards see it. Alumni see it.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic
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By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, “Providence”.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Free trade is not a principle; it is an expedient.
~ Benjamin Disraeli
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Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man’s life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Death is impossible to understand; that someone with whom I shared a moment yesterday, who was vivid and alive, is now in a box and being lowered into the ground forever is not a fact that the brain can comprehend. And to see such grief, over and over, makes it impossible to view death as frivolous or an occasion for jubilation.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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Happiness happens by chance, and is not a law or the logical consequences of actions.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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