If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home.
~ David Foster Wallace
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We only become beasts — we become worse than beasts — when we torment others.
~ Iain Banks
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If conventional visions of success strike so many as bankrupt, how can writers earnestly reclaim—or even hold on to—ambition for art?
~ Lily Meyer via The Atlantic
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The problem with overstuffed to-do lists isn’t just the total time required to execute their contents, but the fact that each new commitment generates its own ongoing administrative demands—emails, chats, check-in calls, “quick” meetings. That’s the overhead tax. Before long, knowledge workers find themselves spending the bulk of their time talking about work instead of actually doing it.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~ Ernest Hemingway
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In the past 20 years, the United States has gone from leading China in 60 of the 64 “frontier technologies” identified by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute to now trailing in all but seven.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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As much as any other institution—schools, libraries, churches—the public-health system has helped propagate the idea of a commons, often working against historical inertia to curb the excesses of American individualism. That work has always required energy and effort from the people. And so it has always been vulnerable, because that energy and effort could dissipate at any time.
~ Vann Newkirk via The Atlantic
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No love can survive muteness.
~ Milan Kundera
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When your local hospital and nursing home get loaded with debt, cut back on staffing and start charging more for worse patient outcomes, that’s financialization as tragedy. When airlines earn more by selling miles to credit card companies than by flying passengers, with consumers footing the hidden bill every time they swipe at the register, financialization has become farce.
~ Oren Cass via The New York Times
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A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.
~ Jim Collins
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