High Quotes - page 90
I took that opportunity to tell him something that, er, I had long thought of telling somebody that was about to enter the world of really high secrecy. And I said, 'Henry, you're about to get a lot of clearence higher than top secret that you did not know existed. That's going to have a sequence of effects on you. First, a great exhileration that you're getting all this amazing information that you didn't know even existed. And the next phase is you'll feel like a fool for not having known about any of this. but that won't last long. Fairly soon, you'll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening to them.
Daniel Ellsberg
What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question-"What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?”-and that she will then get on her high horse and produce what he and Norma call The Plutarch Response. ... The response in question comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. "You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.” Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.
J. M. Coetzee
On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negroes - those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there were Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn't get anything but what was left of the insides of the hog.
Malcolm X
Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the 'structures' that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change. That is, by seeing wholes we learn how to foster health. To do so, systems thinking offers a language that begins by restructuring how we think.
Peter Senge
I had one friend in high school, recently he hung himself with string,
His note said "If livin' is the problem, well that's just baffling."
And at the wake I waited around to see my ex-first love,
And I barely recognized her but I knew exactly what she was thinkin' of
. We sat quietly in the corner, whisperin' close about loss,
And I remembered why I loved her and I asked her why I drove her off.
Jenny Lewis
In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had - zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don't have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they're gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all.
Pauline Kael
Among flower vases, the ware that is given the highest rank is old Iga, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it commands the highest price. When old Iga has been dampened, its colors and its glow take on a beauty such as to awaken on afresh. Iga was fired at very high temperatures. The straw ash and the smoke from the fuel fell and flowed against the surface, and as the temperature dropped, became a sort of glaze. Because the colors were not fabricated but were rather the result of nature at work in the kiln, color patterns emerged in such varieties as to be called quirks and freaks of the kiln. The rough, austere, strong surfaces of old Iga take on a voluptuous glow when dampened. It breathes to the rhythm of the dew of the flowers.
Yasunari Kawabata
I've got maybe five or ten jean jackets with jeans. I can pack three to four pairs of denim jeans, five T-shirts, ten Western-style shirts, and two ties and just buy socks when I get there. That, a Walkman, two books, and some records, and I'm out the door for a year. Not a problem. Doesn't freak me out at all. Usually, if you're thinking about your clothes too much, you're probably not high enough.
Ryan Adams
The Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: "Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man."... The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when "he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined." In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and his sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history -- maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln... He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.
H. L. Mencken
One hypothesis about the delay for the award is that the prize committee realizes that recipients tend to shirk once they get the prize. This consideration was particularly important in Gary's case because he had continued to exhibit high productivity. Thus, the drop in output caused by an early prize for Gary might have had severe adverse consequences for economic research.
Robert Barro
