Sir Richard Carlisle: Do you enjoy these games? In which the player must appear ridiculous?
Dowager Countess of Grantham: Sir Richard, life is a game where the players must appear ridiculous.
Sir Richard Carlisle: Not my life.

I don’t think we can say should about things that happen in war. It just happens and we should live with it.

Not dreading it exactly, but it is a brave, new world we are heading for; no doubt about that. We must try to meet it with as much grace as we can muster.

Church wants you in your place. What sort of man wants to be kept in his place? Do this don’t do that, kneel, stand, kneel, stand…I mean if you go for that sort of thing…I don’t know what to do for you. A man makes his own way. No one gives it to you. You have to take it. Non serviam.

If we’d been older or known better, Bill and I might have been put off by the task in front of us. But we were young and green enough to believe that we just might pull it off.

“There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” he said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”

Now look at him. It’s seven years later, and he’s aged like a president.

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

[Though more popular, it is commonly shortened to: "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."]

Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.

Ideas, [Mike Jones, an engineer at Google] explained, were like babies — everything about their environment said they shouldn’t exist. But they do. You can’t dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.

In the light of the morning, he [Robin Li] realized that as a Chinese citizen, he had no choice, and from that point he implemented the government’s request without complaint. “It’s not an issue to me,” he says. “It’s just Chinese law. I’m not in politics. I’m not in a position to judge what’s right and wrong.

[Discussing the factors that led to the disastrous AOL-Time Warner Merger in 2000]

There are few intoxicants like the prospect of easy money, and that’s what the billions in IPO dollars then raining down on nobodies in Silicon Valley must have looked like. Nor can be discounted the recurring theme of this book: the lure of information empire. In 2010, [Gerald] Levin described to me the condition of being a CEO as “a form of mental illness,” with the desire for never-ending growth as a kind of addiction. As he said, “there’s something about being able to say, ‘I’m the CEO of the world’s largest media company.’ “

Consider the life of Winston Churchill. He was born in 1874. Men still lived who had fought Napoleon. Ulysses S. Grant was in his second term as the American president and Karl Marx was just then in the British Library writing the Communist Manifesto. Mark Twain had written none of the books for which he had become famous. Electricity, radio, television, and telephones were still unknown and only the year before Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgets universities had met to draw up the first rules for a new game. It was called “football.”

When Churchill died ninety years later in 1965, men had orbited the earth, walked in space, and sent a probe to the surface of Venus. An automobile had already driven over six hundred miles per hour and sex-change operations had been successfully performed. Nuclear power had already come of age. Lyndon Johnson was the American president at that time and though he was considered an elderly man, he had been born when Churchill was already thirty-four. The year Churchill died, the Queen of England gave the Order of British Empire to the Beatles. It was an honor Churchill had also received, yet for a far different contribution in a far different age.

How does one life absorb such change? What must it do to one’s moorings, to that sense of connection to the flow of time and how a man experiences the rhythms of the world? Clearly, this was an ever-present challenge in Churchill’s life and it frequently filled his thoughts: “I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”

He has to sell inconsistency, and not have it confused with hypocrisy.

He wants that trance now. His mind disengaging, his eyes tuned to color, shape, relationship. He wants to mix paint, squeeze life from a tube, dip his brushes and bring them up full. Now as if conjuring both his former selves and the self he’s about to become, he holds his brushes, each carrying some old story and yet together forming a gesture of anticipation. One color at a time and all at once. Color as his vocabulary of light.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

I contented myself with whiskey, for medicinal purposes. It helped numb my various aches and pains. Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain; it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.

Although it took her some tie to admit it, Merav began to sense that her body was only a receptacle for his desire, while her own desire floated elsewhere, in another dimension, invisible even to herself. They half-jokingly referred to these times as Letting Him Have His Way With Her, as if she were consenting to the use of her body, lending it out…

…He took his pleasure; in the end, she could see it so clearly. Did he think this was a kind of giving? Maybe. But what was she giving him? Permission to be taken? Finally, she stopped asking why it was enough for him and began asking why it was enough for her.

So important were beer and its effects among the Irish that the pagan high kings of the land had to symbolically marry the goddess-queen Medb (Maeve), whose name meant “the drunken” or “she who makes drunk.” By drinking beer to excess at Tara — an ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland — these kings attained their sovereignty. It is no wonder that St. Patrick took his brewmaster, Mescan, with him as he tried to bring such pagan practices to an end. Beer was simply interwoven into all of Irish life; this was no less the case by the time of Richard Guinness. Though the Irish called whiskey uisce beatha — “the water of life” — by the early 1700s they were glad for the traditions that gave them a healthy and tasty drink that was only lightly intoxicating.

If the stories in this book tell us anything, however, it is that the free market can also lead to situations of reduced freedom. Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power. If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway—they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.

Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one; (3) under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics.

To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs.

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

“I can tell Bob Dylan in an instant,” she said.

“Because his harmonica’s worse than Stevie Wonder?”

She laughed again. Nice to know I could still make someone laugh.

“No, I really like his voice,” she said. “It’s like a kid standing at the window watching the rain.”

After the volumes that have been written about Dylan, I had yet to come across such a perfect description. She blushed when I told her that.

“Oh, I don’t know. That’s just what he sounds like to me”

[Arthur Guinness] was still brewing both ale and the dark stout that had become quite the fashion. In his history with the brew that he would be associated with for generations to come, he is confirmation that the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong. He was not the first or the best or the only brewer to produce dark porter at this time. But he was, perhaps, the most consistent, the most willing to ride the currents of his age, and he was blessed with good timing. If history favors the bold over the most gifted, then Arthur is certainly encouragement to those who are willing to be the former in recognition that they are incapable of being the latter.

“You must not let fatigue set in,” she warns. “That is what my mother said. Let the body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”

“Good advice.”

“To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called ‘mind,’ what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.”

“The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”

“It will end wasteful competition,” said James Taggart. “We’ll stop scrambling to beat one another to the untried and the unknown. We won’t have to worry about new inventions upsetting the market. We won’t have to pour money down the drain in useless experiments just to keep up with overambitious competitors.”

At stake is not the First Amendment or the right of free speech, but the exclusive custody of the master switch. What is wrong is that a single organization, no matter how responsible, should be the gatekeeper, principal user, rate-maker, and adjudicator of who shall ride. Far from limiting the three major news networks’ right to the air or right to report, I would increase the channels available to all users, including the networks. The present system necessarily limits that freedom of speech the broadcasters so eloquently demand and so seldom fully exercise.

Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

She sounded like a nattering older lady, not the vital force he still imagined when he allowed himself to think of her. He had to squeeze his eyes shut to avert renewed weeping. Everything he’d done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they’d had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

“Forgive me, I only wanted t’say that the purity of science often hurts many people, just like pure natural phenomena do. Volcanic eruptions bury whole towns, floods wash bridges away, earthquakes knock buildings flat –”

Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on a Sunday to buy a thermos.

The foolish person seeks happiness in the distance, the wise person grows it under his feet.

So many people in San Francisco came from somewhere else, suitcases filled with their own complex histories and desires.

Even as a kid, he [Mike Burry] began to read about the market as a hobby. Pretty quickly, he saw that there was no logic at all in the charts and graphs and waves and the endless chatter of many self-advertised market pros. Then along came the dot-com bubble and suddenly the entire stock market made no sense at all. “The late nineties almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane,” he said. Formalized as an approach to financial markets during the Great Depression by Benjamin Graham, “value investing” required a tireless search for companies so unfashionable or misunderstood that they could be bought for less than their liquidation value. In its simplest form value investing was a formula, but it had morphed into other things — one of them was whatever Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham’s student, and the most famous value investor, happened to be doing with his money.

Burry did not think investing could be reduced to a formula or learned from any one role model. The more he studied Buffett, the less he thought Buffett could be copied; indeed, the lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to spectacularly unusual. “If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are,” Burry said. “At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules….I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it’d be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true.” [My emphasis]

“Getting the ideas is the painful part,” Watterson confessed. “The drawing is the fun part.” According to the artist, it took him three to six hours to do the drawing and just as long to come up with the idea for it. “I spend hours in my room just leafing through magazines and newspapers looking for a good analogy,” he revealed. “Then [I] begin to play around with it. Sometimes it is very difficult. Other times, it comes quickly.” No matter what the subject he’s tackling, Watterson wanted to make sure that he always had an opinion. “I don’t want to do greeting cards,” he declared. “I don’t want to just illustrate a situation. Anyone can do that. I want to make a definite statement in a fair and humorous way. I think that in my best cartoons, I have achieved that.”

Paul Begala:

The Tea Party, I thought, was about not letting the government take rights away from citizens.

Dana Loesch:

First of all, collective bargaining is not listed in the Constitution as a right.

Cross-chatter.

Dana Loesch:

Collective bargaining is not listed in the Constitution as a right.

Paul Begala:

Neither is having sex with your wife, but it doesn’t mean the government can say I can’t do it!

People would rather have one good, solid and honest emotion in making up their minds than a thousand facts.

Just because your voice reaches around the world doesn’t mean you’re wiser than when it only reached the end of the bar.

[W]hen you go through life … it all seems accidental at the time it is happening. Then when you get on in your 60s or 70s and look back, your life looks like a well-planned novel with a coherent theme … Incidents that seemed accidental, pure chance, turn out to be major elements in the structuring of this novel. Schopenhauer says, ‘Who wrote this novel? You did.’

Familiarity breeds attempt.

Time wounds all heels.

I went down on the Lower East Side today and saw all those Old Testament houses.

We’re all cremated equal.

We’re insufferable friends.

I’ve been working my head to the bone.

Frankly, I’d like to see the government get ouf of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them in fact, is bad acting.

People do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives. The will to be stupid if a very powerful force – but there are always alternatives.

I hope your heart is broken many times because it means you would have loved many times.

Any kiddie in school can love like a fool,
But hating, my boy, is an art.

This sad vicissitude of things.

Girl: But are you a man or a boy?

Jonathan Ames: Well….what’s the difference?

Girl: With a man, you feel like you’re being taken and you like it. And with a boy, you feel like they’re stealing something from you, and you don’t like it.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.