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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 89d75a6 | Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.) While less confident men blathered on, he remained silent, thereby making himself a vessel into which admirers for their.. | leadership speech | Joseph J. Ellis | |
| 7205b42 | One of the petitioners, an infamous do-gooder of uncertain sanity named Warner Mifflin, had actually acknowledged that his antislavery vision came to him after he was struck by lightning in a thunderstorm. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| e01567f | The delegates from the southern states insisted that slaves were property, like horses and sheep, and therefore should not be counted as "Inhabitants." Franklin countered this claim with an edgy joke, observing that slaves, the last time he looked, did not behave like sheep: "Sheep will never make any insurrections." | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| bd13404 | His massive probity, combined with his persistent geniality, made him impossible to hate. He lacked Washington's gravitas, Hamilton's charisma, and Madison's cerebral power, but he more than compensated with a conspicuous cogency in both his conversation and his prose that suggested a deep reservoir of learning he could tap at will. Permanently poised, always the calm center of the storm, when a controversial issue arose, he always seemed t.. | Joseph J. Ellis | ||
| ff69ac4 | When we hurt people just to punish them, Luanne used to say, we create a darkness that will live on long after our reasons for giving birth to it have faded. | Christopher Rice | ||
| d8f2d7a | And quickly. If you let it, grief could swallow you whole. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| 1c892bd | inevitable. The characters we've come to know and love are no longer part of our lives. This can leave us with a certain longing. Perhaps we'll open the book again and skim through it, searching out favorite passages to kindle again those powerful emotions. But the passion is never stirred quite as strong the second time around. So it is with life. We rush through the days that we're given, eager to engage in the conflicts and passions, to .. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| d4b4469 | The secret to happiness is to embrace the humility to accept what comes and the courage to continue on your life's path with an open heart. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| 724ff54 | Mom's are our best cheerleaders. No one else ever cares quite the same. Who else is going to be as angry at you when you do something wrong, or be as proud of you when you do something right? | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| 4b0ecf4 | Dawn tore at the seam of night, pulling the blackness back a little farther with each passing minute. | Mary Alice Monroe | ||
| 449a45b | Human beings are the most successful of animals because of their capability to learn, and an abused animal learns very quickly to defend itself. It also learns very quickly to trust very few people - if any. | lifelessons people trust trust-no-one truthbomb | Brad Thor | |
| ca31a22 | Canada was the most patient invading force in the world--one penny at a time, one pop singer at a time, one actor at a time. ... It might take them ten thousand years to conquer the United States, but they were on the move, and the American people needed to wake up. | Brad Thor | ||
| a29352d | We don't even use the word terror anymore. There's only 'man-made disasters' caused by disenfranchised groups who are really just 'misunderstood. | Brad Thor | ||
| 2b458cc | We've been warned." "Exactly. It's a clever form of the Hegelian dialectic--a psychological tool used to manipulate the masses. In this case, you create a problem, wait for the reaction, and then offer the solution. What people historically fail to realize, though, is that those offering the solution are the same people who caused the problem in the first place. They also fail to realize that no matter what the solution is, it always ends u.. | Brad Thor | ||
| e404ec8 | Muslim students would go through a bunch of feel-good exercises and leave with the impression that without Islamic contributions to science, there would be no U.S. space program. | Brad Thor | ||
| 9832d02 | While the words are yet unspoken, you are master of them; when once they are spoken, they are master of you. | Brad Thor | ||
| dfb4edc | I know my limits. You don't ever need to worry about me." "Thanks, Scot. I'll remind myself of that next time I see you looking like a flipped turtle." | Brad Thor | ||
| a253081 | He was coming in way too fast. He'd had no choice. The wind had changed, and coming in quickly was the only way to keep up with the speed of the enormous vessel. | Brad Thor | ||
| 43e18d7 | Al Qaeda" didn't translate to "the base," as most Western media outlets had so ignorantly reported, but rather, "the database." It referred to the original computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with the help of the CIA to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan." | Brad Thor | ||
| 3760f46 | Peasant families were close-knit. However, as the Black Death swept through village after village, it became difficult for young peasants to find spouses. The fragmentation of families by illness, coupled with new economic mobility, led many young men to move to the city. "In England, many noblemen encouraged this migration by converting their land to raising livestock rather than farming, evicting their tenants and closing down entire vill.. | Patricia D. Netzley | ||
| 191e70d | Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored th.. | Aimee Bender | ||
| e757f01 | Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held. | Aimee Bender | ||
| f492a1a | He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 2d4e840 | Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen. | Michael Lewis | ||
| ed6c023 | His life was dedicated to the fine art of tearing down and building anew. | Michael Lewis | ||
| d205c14 | There is nothing more satisfying to me," he said, "than to create a complete self-contained world when a computer is controlling it." | Michael Lewis | ||
| b3006eb | In something like an instant the man had changed his life. He reinvented his relationship to the world around him in a way that is considered normal only in California. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 65d3b8e | BAFU. Billions and All Fucked Up. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 6e3b2de | Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: They had been forced to learn to program computers without the luxury of endless computer time. Many years later, when he had plenty of computer time, Serge still wrote out new programs on paper before typing them into the machine. "In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes," he said. "When you write a program, you are given.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 951ffab | Belief in the Law of Small Numbers" teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made--even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and Danny argued, because they believed--even if they did not acknowledge the belief--that any gi.. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 25fd56a | But if you worry about everything, you wind up worrying about nothing. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 3ede4f5 | Isocrates: "Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 5c5918f | Losing shouldn't be fun. It's not fun for me. If I'm going to be miserable, you're going to be miserable. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 4a87f53 | What people remember about the past, they suggested, is likely to warp their judgment of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination."P The" | Michael Lewis | ||
| a907c55 | By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface. "It" | Michael Lewis | ||
| 737c3a8 | He was the person for whom the clock was always running out, the game was always tied, and the ball was always in his hands. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 4b13ffe | In eight years alone--2010-2018--the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it's because of these people. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 83ff6f0 | The first thing Gutenberg sought to publish, after the Bible, was a laxative timetable he called a "Purgation-Calendar." Then there is the astonishing number of anal German folk sayings. "As the fish lives in water, so does the shit stick to the asshole!," to select but one of the seemingly endless examples." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 1c13443 | The same system that once gave us subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock market trades that occurred at fractions of a penny at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 440108f | The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. --Leo Tolstoy, 1897 | Michael Lewis | ||
| 1b4975f | I have a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy occurs. | Michael Lewis | ||
| bad2ca3 | People with Asperger's couldn't control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues. | Michael Lewis | ||
| 4087e3d | What's amazing is that they make a market in this fantasy stuff," said Druskin. "It's not a real asset." | Michael Lewis | ||
| 7866873 | The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A. | Michael Lewis |