Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. —Stephen Covey”
― James F. Cox III, Thinking Processes Including S&T Trees

“This was all competently taught by the nation’s business schools for decades—until they discovered what I’ll call the “Sense of Academic Inferiority”
― Bob Lutz, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business

“To every human being in prison, guilty or innocent, I would say that everything depends upon attitude. The physical body is the vehicle in which we traverse life, but our attitude is our steering wheel. In prison, people find themselves at the bottom of human existence. What a prisoner must say is, OK, whatever I’ve done in life has led me to where I am today. Therefore, if I want to get out of prison and stay out, I’ve got to turn around and go back the other way.”
― Rubin Carter, Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom

“No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensible to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one — if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken by the ego of denying the dangers it sees threatening it in the external world.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“That April, the Senate had adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, declaring an end to slavery, and in January 1865, the House of Representatives followed. With the Proclamation, the Union army was open to blacks. And the more blacks entered the war, the more it appeared a war for their liberation. The more whites had to sacrifice, the more resentment there was, particularly among poor whites in the North, who were drafted by a law that allowed the rich to buy their way out of the draft for $300. And so the draft riots of 1863 took place, uprisings of angry whites in northern cities, their targets not the rich, far away, but the blacks, near at hand. It was an orgy of death and violence. A black man in Detroit described what he saw: a mob, with kegs of beer on wagons, armed with clubs and bricks, marching through the city, attacking black men, women, children. He heard one man say: “If we are got to be killed up for Negroes then we will kill every one in this town.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“In other words, too much of our attention is devoted to things that don’t matter... things that consume valuable resources (time, money and skill) yet don’t contribute in any meaningful way to fulfilling the system’s mission. In fact, without a clear understanding of the vertical dependency between action and outcome, many of the formal activities that take place in most systems are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the RMS Titanic after it stuck the iceberg.”
― H. William Dettmer, The Logical Thinking Process: An Executive Summary

“By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within the society…. it actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth against the weakest groups in the society.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“Morgan had escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon’s father had written to him that “a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“The presidential election itself had avoided real issues; there was no clear understanding of which interests would gain and which would lose if certain policies were adopted. It took the usual form of election campaigns, concealing the basic similarity of the parties by dwelling on personalities, gossip, trivialities. Henry Adams, an astute literary commentator on that era, wrote to a friend about the election: We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved…. But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“A New York banker toasted the Supreme Court in 1895: “I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States—guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

“Do not look at my outward shape, But take what is in my hand.”
― Rumi

“benefits – as we define them – involve showing how you can meet an explicit need which the customer has expressed. Unless the customer first says, ‘I want it’, you can’t give a benefit. It’s no wonder that customers are most likely to express approval when you show you can give them something they want.”
― Neil Rackham, SPIN® -Selling

“Put yourself in the shoes of an eighteenth-century country doctor. You’re treating a very ill patient. You’ve tried everything, yet nothing seems to work. So, in desperation, you put together a mixture of herbs and potions. Your patient takes the mixture and recovers. Eureka! Your medicine works, you’ve found a miracle cure. What you don’t see, in your enthusiasm, is that the patient was getting better anyway.”
― Neil Rackham, SPIN® -Selling

“For the rest of your life you honestly believe it was your mixture which caused the recovery.”
― Neil Rackham, SPIN® -Selling

“THE SEA OF BEING IN Being's silver sea
Lustrous pearls of knowledge are washed up
On the shore of speech,
And dainty shells bring poems in their curving forms
To strew the beach with beauty. Each wave that breaks in foaming arcs
Casts up a thousand royal pearls
That hold strange murmuring voices,
Gems of devotion, joy, and love. Yet though a thousand waves
At every moment rise and fall,
Scattering pearls and shells,
Yet are there ever more and more to come,
Nor is that sea of Being less by one sheer drop. PEARLS OF KNOWLEDGE IN the sea of ’Uman, the pearl oysters
Rise to the surface from the lowest depths,
And wait with opened mouths.
Then arises from the sea a mist, Which falls again in raindrops
Into the mouths of the shells
(At the command of the Truth).
Straightway is each closed as by a hundred bonds,
And the shells sink back again
Into the ocean's depths,
Bearing in their hearts the pearl drops
Which the divers seek and find. The sea is Being, the shore the body;
The mist, grace, and the rain, knowledge of the Name;
Human Wisdom is the diver
Who holds enwrapped in his garment
A hundred pearls;
The soul in a swift lightning's flash
Bears to the listening ear voices and messages”
― Mahmud Shabistari, The Secret Rose Garden

“Creio; eu não sou somente a vida; sou também a morte, e tu estás prestes a devolver-me o que te emprestei. Grande lascivo, espera-te a voluptuosidade do nada.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas