Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage. I think what gives my works whatever universality they have is that they use the metaphysical secret world to describe some realities of the overt world.
~ John le Carré
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If we exiled our sins, our virtues would get lonely without their old sparring partners.
~ Henry S. Haskins
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It was one of those nights when the sky came down and wrapped itself around the world. The rain clawed at the windows of the bar like an angry cat and tried to sneak in every time some drunk lurched in the door. The place reeked of stale beer and soggy men with enough cheap perfume thrown in to make you sick.
~ Mickey Spillane via The Big Kill (1951)
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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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Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.
~ Eric Hoffer
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Is there anything more satisfying than watching a debate in which the sophist gets defenestrated by someone smarter, better prepared, and obviously right?
~ Caitlin Flanagan via The Atlantic
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A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes the system likely to oscillate.
~ Donella Meadows
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Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
~ John Ruskin
Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.
~ Jerry Useem via The Atlantic
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“The citizenry of a hyperpower are always inwardly focussed – barely aware of the rest of the world.”
~ Jasper John MacKay
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