Steve > Steve's Quotes

“The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

“Cattle grazing on public lands is heavily subsidized by the federal government, so yes, all of us taxpayers are helping to pay for tremendous environmental degradation.”
― Mary Ellen Hannibal, The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save America's Last, Best Wilderness

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.”
― Werner Herzog

“Bill cites three tenets to his personal philosophy as it applies to public health, which we would all do well to follow: First, as confusing and bewildering as things may seem, we live in a cause-and-effect world. So somewhere, the answers are out there. Second, know the truth—and the first step to knowing the truth is wanting to know the truth, rather than any alternative that seems more satisfying or closer to your own worldview. Third, not one of us does anything worthwhile on our own.”
― Michael T. Osterholm, Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs

“You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.”
― Fareed Zakaria, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

“At the front in Germany near the end of the war, McCloy discovered that the ninth-century city of Rothenburg was about to be shelled. McCloy’s mother had once visited the town and brought back etchings; he knew it was an ancient center of German culture. “This is one of Europe’s last great walled cities,” he told the American commander. Perhaps, McCloy suggested, it could be induced to surrender peacefully. It was, and after the war the city voted him an honorary burgher.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

“One of the controversial Bush nominees the Gang of Fourteen deal failed to stop was a partisan operative with no judicial experience. His qualifications were primarily political, having been an assistant to Special Investigator Kenneth Starr before becoming staff secretary to President George W. Bush. An active member of the Federalist Society, he had been nominated in 2003, before the Gang’s deal was struck, but the Senate declined to confirm him due to his extreme partisanship and lack of qualifications. Daring Democrats to block him again and give Republicans a reason to go nuclear, Bush renominated him in 2005. His hearings were contentious, but he made it through the committee.68 Intimidated by Republicans’ continued threats to go nuclear, Democrats declined to filibuster him when his nomination came to the floor. On May 26, 2006, by a vote of 57 to 36, he was confirmed to the U.S.”
― Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy

“These endless ankle-twisting contradictions underfoot, amorphous, resistant, cutting, dull, become the uncountable futilities heaped upon one’s own shores by the surrounding ocean of indifference. If then one could elevate gloom into metaphysical despair, see the human race as no taller than that most depressing of life-forms, the lichen that stains so many of these bare stones black, one might, paradoxically, march on with a weightier stride that would soon outwalk the linear desert. Instead, the interminable dump of broken bits and pieces one is toiling along stubbornly remains the merely personal accumulation of petty worries, selfish anxieties, broken promises, discarded aspirations and other chips off a life-worn ego, that constitutes the path to one’s own particular version of nowhere.”
― Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimmage

“WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY”
― Tracy Kidder, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

“An old man told his grandson, “My boy, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. The first one is Evil. He is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies, and ego. The second is Good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth.” The boy thought about this for a moment, then asked, “Grandfather, which wolf wins?” The old man replied, “The one you feed.” —TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICAN FOLK TALE”
― C.M. Kushins, Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon

“But even when the names of Black fighters did not survive, stories of their exploits did. Half a century later, José Antonio Aponte, a free Black carpenter and the grandson of one of the Black militiamen who defended Havana against the British, painted pictures precisely of scenes like this, of Black troops taking British men prisoner, of military encampments guarded by Black soldiers. Indeed, Aponte would use those pictures to recruit Black men to a major conspiracy against slavery.”
― Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History

“It’s hard to know exactly how many children are killed or maimed by guns because in 1996, Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark., at the behest of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and weapons manufacturers, attached the Dickey Amendment to a must-pass omnibus spending bill, making it illegal for the CDC to keep track of or analyze the data. Congress simultaneously cut the CDC’s budget by the exact amount it had been spending to track gun violence.10 (Sixteen years later, Dickey essentially apologized in a Washington Post op-ed, calling for research into gun violence.11 As he later told ABC, “I wish I had not been so reactionary.”12)”
― Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment: How to Talk about Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Polarizing Topics

“In the center of Climentoro, a town in Huehuetenango, a dozen large white houses rose above the village’s traditional wooden huts like giant monuments. The structures were made of concrete and fashioned with archways, colonnaded porches, and elaborate moldings; some even boasted facades decorated with paintings of American flags. Their owners, who lived in the US, had sent money home to build American-inspired houses for when they returned, but few did. One three-story house with a faux-brick chimney was empty. The family of twelve had migrated a few years ago, leaving the vacant construction behind. Vecinos fantasmas, Feliciano Pérez, a local farmer, called them—ghost neighbors.”
― Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis