Thursday, October 30, 2008

Dark Ages America by Morris Berman - Quotations

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. Morris Berman. 2006. ISBN 0-393-05866-2

Samuel Huntington
The West won the world not by its superiority in its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

H.L. Mencken
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more clearly, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Emmanuel Todd
Theatrical military activism against inconsequential rogue states … is a sign of weakness, not of strength … This is classic for a crumbling system … The final glory is militarism.

Polly Toynbee
God’s chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a self-image almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old Soviet Union. The most advanced … nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to the world around it.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 2

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 051775699

Frederich Buechner
We shy away from introspection because, however fearful the surface seems, we fear the depths still more. And we are right. There is much to fear there. If there is terror about darkness because we cannot see, there is also terror about light because we can see. Would rather not see.

Helder Camara
When your ship, long moored in harbor, gives you the illusion of being a house … put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.

Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget what we whispered and what we dreamed. We forget who we were.

Annie Dillard
The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Crisis Investing by Douglas Casey - Quotations

Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s. Douglas Casey. 1995. ISBN 978-0806516127

Lord Byron
Ready money is Aladdin's Lamp.

Jean-Francois Revel
Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will not find a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say it has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves a myth is wrong.

Paul Samuelson (Nobel laureate, in 1989)
The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

Mark Skousen
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state is a complete failure of civilization, while a totally voluntary society is its ultimate success.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 1

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 051775699

Anonymous
The successful artist is someone who continues to make art and isn’t more than 50 percent bitter about the rest of life.

John Berryman
Artists are extremely lucky who are presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill them. Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing. Among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. I hope to be nearly crucified.

David Bayles and Ted Orland
Fears about yourself dig into your ability to do your best work, while fears about what others will think of you compromise your ability to do your own work.

Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Awe by Paul Pearsall - Quotations

Awe: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion.
Paul Pearsall. 2007. ISBN 978-0757305856

Editor, Publisher’s Weekly
Nobody ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public.

Wallace Stevens
The imagination is man’s power over nature.

Fritz von Unruh
The dog is the only being that loves you more than you love yourself.

Thorstein Veblen
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Against the Odds - Quotations

Against the Odds: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Peter L. Bernstein. 1998. ISBN 978-0471295631

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

John Maynard Keynes
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Amos Tversky
Probably the most significant and pervasive characteristic of the human pleasure machine is that people are much more sensitive to negative than to positive stimuli ... think about how well you feel today, and then try to imagine how much better you could feel ... there are a few things that would make you feel better, but the number of things that would make you feel worse is unbounded.

Amos Tversky
The major driving force is loss aversion. It is not so much that people hate uncertainty – but rather, they hate losing.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Health, Humor, Academia, Age Quotations

HEALTH
Seneca
It is a part of the cure to wish to be cured.

HUMOR
Jean Paul Richter
No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.

ACADEMIA
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
A degree is not an education, and the confusion on this point is perhaps the gravest weakness in American thinking about education.

AGE
Leo Rosenberg
First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Writing, Wealth, Go For It, Age Quotations

WRITING
Dorothy Parker
If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best thing you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.

WEALTH
John Wicker
Wealth is not in making money, but in making the man while he is making money.

GO FOR IT
Jonathan Winters
I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

AGE
Oscar Wilde
To get back one’s youth, one merely has to repeat one’s follies.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

100 Ways to Motivate Yourself - Quotations

100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever. Steve Chandler. 2004.

Robert Fritz
When your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process, a very different experience of life opens to you – one in which you are involved with life at its very essence.

Napoleon Hill
The great master key to riches is nothing more or less than the self-discipline necessary to help you take full and complete possession of your own mind. Remember, it is profoundly significant that the only thing over which you have complete control is your own mental attitude.

Arnold Schwartzenegger
It’s the same process I used in bodybuilding. What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true.

Colin Williams
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by the world, but by a million possible worlds.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Self, Religion, Degradation, Marriage Quotations

SELF
Jean Rostand
To be adult is to be alone.

RELIGION
Oscar Wilde
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

DEGRADATION
Simone Weil
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

MARRIAGE
Oscar Wilde
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Perception, Freedom, Attitude, Friends Quotations

PERCEPTION
Anais Nin
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

FREEDOM
Marina Tsvetayeva
Freedom – a drunken whore sprawling in a power-maddened soldier’s arms.

ATTITUDE
Booker Taliaferro Washington
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

FRIENDS
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them.