Max > Max's Quotes

“Throw away thy books. No longer distract thyself.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We experience [procrastination] as fear. But fear of what?

Fear of the consequences of following our heart. Fear of bankruptcy, fear of poverty, fear of insolvency. Fear of groveling when we try to make it on our own, and of groveling when we give up and come crawling back to where we started. Fear of being selfish, of being rotten wives or disloyal husbands; fear of failing to support our families, of sacrificing their dreams for ours. Fear of betraying our race, our 'hood, our homies. Fear of failure. Fear of being ridiculous. Fear of throwing away the education, the training, the preparation that those we love have sacrificed so much for, that we ourselves have worked our butts off for. Fear of launching into the void, of hurtling too far out there; fear of passing some point of no return, beyond which we cannot recant, cannot reverse, cannot rescind, but must live with this cocked-up choice for the rest of our lives. Fear of madness. Fear of insanity. Fear of death.

These are serious fears. But they're not the real fear. Not the master fear, the mother of all fears that's so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don't believe it.

Fear That We Will Succeed.”
― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

“Alignment, to us, means bringing pieces into the same line - the same direction. The metaphor is that a magnet will make pieces of iron point toward it. Agreement is shared intellectual understanding. Tribes are clusters of people, and people are complex and nonrational at times. If a tribe is united only by agreement, as soon as times change, agreement has to be reestablished. If people learn new ideas or see a problem from a new perspective, they no longer agree, so tribes based on agreement often discourage learning, questioning, and independent thought. Tribes based on alignment want to maximize each person's contribution, provided that they stay pointed in the same direction like magnetized iron filings.”
― Dave Logan, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

“When steel mills can move to more hospitable climates, they no longer present a stationary target for government or union control. The more than sixty minimills in the United States moved not toward the coal and iron deposits in the ground but toward the source of scrap and cheap electricity. The new technology moved them into the information economy, not an economy of gadgets and computer games but a fundamental upheaval by which men and nations make their living and thus a revolution of all the rules by which we live.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“Information has always been power, now it is also wealth. Nonmaterial and, with the aid of modern technology, extremely mobile, information can escape government control far more easily than other forms of capital. Draconian or even merely bureaucratic systems for controlling the flow or use of information tend to destroy or waste it. Economically useful information is usually original, innovative, or at least timely, nuanced, precise, complex, and challenging. Bureaucracies and governments live for delay, blunt originality, oppose innovation, abhor nuance. Governments are good at governing matter but everywhere misrule mind, especially the best and most productive minds, minds that are frustrated and demoralized by the pretensions of the merely powerful.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda. In the new world money market, for example, currency values are now decided by a constant referendum of thousands of currency traders in hundreds of trading rooms around the globe, all connected to each other by a vast electronic network giving each trader instant access to information about any factor that might affect values. That constant referendum makes it much harder for central banks and governments to manipulate currency values.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“If capital is what produces a stream of income - and that is a definition no one seems to quarrel with - then it follows that software is a form of capital. It has always been difficult to measure any form of knowledge capital, but in the past the problem was not as urgent, since the ratio of difficult-to-quantify knowledge capital to more tangible capital was not as high or growing as rapidly as it is today.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“There is no cure for illusion. There is only the opportunity for discovery.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“Although much has been written about the decline of American competitiveness, in many ways this new global market plays to our strengths. The constant in the global marketplace is change, and change is what we Americans deal with best. We have always been innovators. Who else would choose as a national motto on our great seal "novus ordo seclorum" - the new order of the ages. This native adaptability is in itself a type of "infrastructural" advantage, an infrastructure of culture that will serve us well as long as we refuse to panic in the face of statisticians and pundits wielding yesterday's numbers and telling us we're washed up if we remain ourselves.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“The old revolutionary chant "Power to the People," usually accompanied by a raised clenched fist, has gone out of fashion. The failure of the socialist model has become too evident. The phrase probably came from the battle cry of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution when the slogan was "Power to the Soviets." In America in the 1960s the Soviet slogan was corrupted into what some called "participatory democracy," and people like "Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society were calling for a transfer of power to the 'people,' whom they were able to identify as themselves." Later on, the "Power to the People" slogan was adopted by Bobby Seale as the chant of the Black Panthers. Needless to say, the last thing many of these people had in mind was actually giving all of the people a real voice in their government. But that is what is happening now.”
― Walter B. Wriston

“Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism - from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism - the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar... To flood the world with images of ourselves. It is to these images and not the material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have now fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“Much of what we have been doing to improve the world's opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which we have sent over the world are primary aids to the belief in the irrelevance, the arrogance, the rigidity, and the conceit of America. Not because they are poorly made. On the contrary, because they are well made and vividly projected. Not because they are favorable images or unfavorable images, but because they are images.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“We try to make our celebrities stand in for the heroes we no longer have, or for those who have been pushed out of our view... Yet the celebrity is usually nothing greater than a more-publicized version of us. In imitating him, in trying to dress like him, talk like him, look like him, think like him, we are simply imitating ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“The shadow has become the substance.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“Our great artists battle on a landscape we cannot chart, with weapons we do not comprehend, against adversaries we find unreal.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“The more readily we make household names and the more numerous they become, the less are they worthy of our admiration... We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now-almost-forgotten sense, all heroes are self-made.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof when your own doorstep is unclean.”
― confucius

“If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return – if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right.”
― Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People

“There's magic, positive magic, in such phrases as: "I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“When we are right, let’s try to win people gently and tactfully to our way of thinking, and when we are wrong – and that will be surprisingly often, if we are honest with ourselves – let’s admit our mistakes quickly and with enthusiasm. Not only will that technique produce astonishing results; but, believe it or not, it is a lot more fun, under the circumstances, than trying to defend oneself.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“I consider it completely irresponsible that public schools offer sex education but no systematic guidance to adolescent girls, who should be thinking about how they want to structure their future lives: do they want children, and if so, when should that be scheduled, with the advantages and disadvantages of each option laid out. Because of the stubborn biological burden of pregnancy and childbirth, these are issues that will always affect women more profoundly than men. Starting a family early has its price for an ambitions young woman, a career hiatus that may be difficult to overcome. On the other hand, the reward of being with one's children in their formative years, instead of farming out that fleeting and irreplaceable experience to day care centres or nannies, has an inherent emotional and perhaps spiritual value that has been lamentable ignored by second-wave feminism.”
― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism

“Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.”
― William F. Buckley Jr.

“Industry is the enemy of melancholy”
― William F. Buckley Jr.

“Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”
― William F. Buckley

“Just as the attempts to preserve the power of knights in armor were doomed to fail in the face of gunpowder weapons, so the modern notions of nationalism and citizenship are doomed to be short-circuited by microtechnology. Indeed, they will eventually become comic in much the way that the sixteenth century. The cherished civic notions of the twentieth century will be comic anachronisms to new generations after the transformation of the year 2000. The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.”
― James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age

“Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised; and the rememberer and the remembered; and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree; no not anyone with himself; and the whole earth too is a point.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations