harper Reed > harper's Quotes

“No nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3”). Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”85”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“The first is that if you haven’t manufactured the new thing in substantial quantities, you have not innovated; the second is that if you haven’t found a market to sell the product, you have not innovated.”
― Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

“we are servants of the zeitgeist.”
― Kyle Buchanan, Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road – The Epic Oral History of an Oscar-Winning Masterpiece

“damselfish.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”
― Evan Osnos, The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich

“we should accept that China will be a global tech power in the future and start managing the risk now, rather than pretending the west can sit out China’s technological rise.”
― Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

“ПOΛHAЯПYOTOTA—”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection