Spencer Claiborne > Spencer's Quotes

“Having no choices, no agency, was a killer, but having too many was equally crippling.”
― Jillian Medoff, This Could Hurt

“Kenny’s career trajectory had been a frenetic scramble, with personality conflicts, professional counseling, and extended periods of unemployment along the way. At Wharton, his devotion to studying was legendary. If a subject intrigued him, he’d work seventy-two hours at a clip, with a laser focus that could bend the world’s edges. School was a sanctuary where he chased ideas like rabbits down into whatever random, circuitous holes they traveled. In retrospect, he should’ve stayed for his PhD and become an academic, worn open-collared shirts, comfortable shoes. Instead, he listened to Janine and went high-ticket corporate, only to discover that he wasn’t cut out for the real world. Out here, smart people were made to repeat the same simple tasks over and over until all their intelligence drained out. Out here, Kenny couldn’t get traction. His attention wandered, his already poor listening skills deteriorated. He lost track of time. Missed deadlines.”
― Jillian Medoff, This Could Hurt

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I’ve lived in greater China off and on for more than a dozen years. I have taken years of Mandarin lessons. I can recite a Tang dynasty poem. Occasionally I drink bubble tea. But my understanding of China ends at bu tai qing chu. In a literal sense, the phrase does mean “not very clear.” But it has a linguistic flexibility. Each time I grasp a new context for bu tai qing chu, it turns up in a new way. It means at least these things: I can’t help you. I will not help you. I don’t want to tell you. I’ll get in trouble. You don’t deserve to know. I’m moving on now.”
― Scott Tong, A Village with My Name: A Family History of China's Opening to the World

“She could envision the opposite of the UpPaying trend making its way toward all of them: a movement in which people paid a premium for more contact, not less.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“Consider these numbers from noted British economic historian Angus Maddison: In the fourteenth century, the typical Chinese person made a tad bit more than his or her Western European counterpart—annual income per person totaled $600 in China, compared with $560 in Europe. But then Europe grew and China stood still. China’s income fell to two-thirds of the European standard by 1700, and then it cratered. By 1900, the median Chinese person earned $545 annually—in dollar terms, almost unchanged from six centuries prior—compared with $3,000 in Germany and more than $4,000 in England and the United States. Industrialization and its benefits were passing China by.”
― Scott Tong, A Village with My Name: A Family History of China's Opening to the World

“The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“They have taken advantage of our trust, using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of human psychology, to gather and exploit private data, and to craft business models that do not protect users from harm.”
― Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

“It works twenty-four hours a day for decades without (for the most part) needing regular servicing or the installation of spare parts, runs on water and a few organic compounds, is soft and rather lovely, is accommodatingly mobile and pliant, reproduces itself with enthusiasm, makes jokes, feels affection, appreciates a red sunset and a cooling breeze. How many machines do you know that can do any of that? There is no question about it. You are truly a wonder. But then so, it must be said, is an earthworm.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“People who live close to the land tend to harbor a sense of realism about the role of luck in their lives. Reynolds Price, a novelist and one of my college teachers, put it well: “Scratch a farmer and find the tragic sense of life. You can’t convince a farmer that life is just one big Coors beer bash . . . They live according to the laws of sun, ice, and water.” But those who are cut off from the land, except as a place to relax and recreate, are often afflicted with urban idealism. More and more people today live in a world of streets and houses and buildings and stadiums and schools. Stores and shops provide their food. All of these have been built by man, and it can lead us to an unnatural conclusion, even if we are unaware of it: that man has the potential to create a paradise.”
― Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life