Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings. When we look for the meaning of life, we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what my particular role is in the cosmic drama. This role makes me a part of something bigger than myself, and gives meaning to all my experiences and choices.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“If you want to know the ultimate truth of life, rites and rituals are a huge obstacle. But if you are interested in social stability and harmony, as Confucius was, truth is often a liability, whereas rites and rituals are among your best allies.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step toward ceasing to generate more suffering.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“In a bygone era government was solely responsible for addressing the Nation’s biggest problems, from building the interstate highway system to the New Deal social programs. However, today’s challenges are more complicated and interconnected than ever before and cannot be solved by a single actor or solution. That is why government has an opportunity to engage with the actors in the Impact Economy from non-profits to businesses.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“There is tremendous pressure to turn thoughts into commodities—into tiny, usable takeaways, into Monday morning insights for the CEO, into ideas that are profitable rather than compelling for their own sake.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“There were many things that business traditionally did to support the community, from training people to whole sets of other activities that they sort of took responsibility for, which we call investing in the commons,” Porter said. By commons he meant the shared assets of a place—things such as public schools that both industry and average people benefit from. “As people got disconnected from locations, business stopped really reinvesting in that. They thought their job was globalizing.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“The “conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized,” he wrote. Inequality is a better thing than it may seem, Carnegie explained: “The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial.” Stratification was the price of the onward chugging of progress.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Generosity is not a substitute for justice, but here, as so often in MarketWorld, it was allowed to stand in. The institutions that benefited from the Sacklers’ largesse have shown little interest in demanding that they atone for any role they might have played in fomenting a national crisis”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that contribute to democracy, and they can do so in ways that disrupt it. The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.” But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.” These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“A company not run purely in shareholders’ interests risked lawsuits from its investors. The dominant interpretation of corporate law, as we’ve seen, has since the 1970s come to regard companies’ first duty as being to earn a profit for shareholders. A company that put social goals ahead of business ones had no clear place in this regime.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Was it more important to make it easier for Etsy to do good, or rather to make it harder for ExxonMobil to do harm? Was it possible to do both?”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“As I read Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I came upon a line that brought the purpose of my own book into focus. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable,” Piketty writes, “depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“money had transcended being currency to become our very culture, conquering our imaginations and infiltrating domains that had nothing to do with it.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World