Randy Stapilus > Randy's Quotes

“Alas, the big data profiles of teenagers can’t support the same robustness of growth as entire continents of slaves and spices. Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. They make the differential between real growth and return on capital worse, not better. This means they push the banks and investors even further away from anything like real earnings until eventually there’s a complete disconnect between capital and value.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity

“My intentions were good. I was trying to do what was best for Enron, but the way we as a company defined success was incorrect. We defined success by reported earnings and the stock price. We were not defining it as increasing economic value,”
― Eugene Soltes, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal

“In such a world, emotions are reassuring. “I can no longer grasp or understand, let alone control, the world in which I live. Therefore I have to emphasize my differences with others and give priority to my emotions.”
― Dominique Moïsi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope are Reshaping the World

“Modern communication isn’t about truth, it’s about a resonant narrative. The myth about PR is that you will educate and inform people. No. The public wants to be told in a story who to like and who to hate.”
― Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big Business

“Yugoslavia didn’t erupt into civil war because Croats and Serbs and Bosniaks had an innate, primordial hatred for one another. It erupted because opportunistic leaders tapped into fears and resentments and then released small groups of well-armed thugs on the population in order to gain power.”
― Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them

“Trump effect.” Five years earlier, only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed that “a person who commits an ‘immoral’ act could behave ethically in a public role.” The month before the election, 72 percent believed this was possible. According to the PRRI’s Robert P. Jones, “This dramatic abandonment of the whole idea of ‘value voters’ is one of the most stunning reversals in recent American political history”
― Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.”
― Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“Frankfurter worried that assigning to the Supreme Court the job of protecting liberal rights would relieve the public of the responsibility to protect basic rights on its own, through influencing the legislature. If the courts should become the institution charged with protecting rights, he feared, the public would cease to care about protecting rights itself. Legislators might enact laws that they knew to be unconstitutional, passing the buck to the courts in the expectation they would strike those laws down. What was more, the courts might eventually lose their legitimacy, since they would be seen as acting against the public, not in fulfillment of its most deeply held values. The right thing to do, therefore, under our basic constitutional structure, was to rely on the democratic polity to preserve rights, not for the courts to intervene.”
― Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

“core tenet of the Trump political movement has been finding publicly acceptable targets to serve as receptacles for preexisting anger.”
― Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

“In”
― Philip Bump, The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America