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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.”
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.
Obama told me, “that if you are truthful, people respond, even if they don’t agree with you. We have to find our truth and not be afraid to be straight with people.”
President Johnson’s famous observation that a leader’s problem was not in “doing what’s right, but knowing what’s right.”
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”
“When the game gets close and something big is on the line, it all slows down, and I see things better.”
Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who wisely wrote, “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
Hirschman’s thesis was that those who didn’t want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile (“futility”), that it would likely make matters worse (“perversity”), or that it would imperil some other goal (“jeopardy”).
officials wearing badges around their necks run around the world trying to find foreign officials who wear badges around their necks. And they call it diplomacy,” he said. “This is why we know so little about what is actually going on anywhere.”
“The power of human dignity is always underestimated until the day it finally prevails.”
Former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld may have best summed up both the UN’s track record and its promise when he said it was created “not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.”
Hirschman wrote that when someone is unhappy with a policy or practice, they can choose to “exit,” exercise “voice” (communicate grievances internally or through public protest), or be governed by “loyalty,” which “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”
Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “We must always seek the truth in our opponent’s error and the error in our own truth.”
People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change the world, but they can change many individual worlds.
