Michael Conniff > Michael's Quotes

“It’s extremely confusing to think about trying not to think, but I will say this: if Tolstoy really did pass the entrance exam for the White Polar Bear Club, he was in the wrong profession writing novels. He should have been a golfer.”
― John Paul Newport, The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours

“Ben Hogan, in a phrase I always liked, talked about how he “dug his game out of the dirt.”
― John Paul Newport, The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours

“If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five.”
― Paulette Jiles, News of the World

“Nothing is held to be lawful or right among the Persians unless it is first ratified by a priest.”34 Without such discipline”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“ran into two psychologists who were teaching this idea of transformational therapy”
― Sam Smith, Masters of the Game: A Conversational History of the NBA in 75 Legendary Players

“Don’t see them at their most limited level; see them where they can be the best of who they are. Like Popovich with the guy he had stand in the corner”
― Sam Smith, Masters of the Game: A Conversational History of the NBA in 75 Legendary Players

“In the caravan that went up and down and around the burning-hot backlands”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World

“The philosopher Jürgen Habermas was arguably the preeminent European public intellectual of the postwar era”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“the question that Karp wanted to explore—what turns ordinary citizens into perpetrators of genocide and accessories to mass murder? And Karp’s timing was fortuitous”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Girard was best known for his theory of mimetic desire”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“In response”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“At some point—he can’t recall exactly when—it occurred to Thiel that PayPal’s anti-fraud algorithms could perhaps be repurposed to help the government thwart future acts of terrorism.”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“9/11 was”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“a program whose purpose was to use the most advanced technologies on the market to build what amounted to a massive dragnet that could help protect the country from terrorism. It was called Total Information Awareness”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“From the start”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“There was nothing utopian about Palantir; if anything”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Karp had no use for the Beckettian “fail better next time” ethos because there was no guarantee that there would be a next time”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“Exceptions were made”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“To land a position at Palantir”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“From its inception”
― Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State

“almost everything enjoyed by the rich”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“The ragged armies of the dispossessed”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Adherents of Justice”: the world’s first communist manifesto. How was it”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“the first president to put a phone on his desk—”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Richard Whitney reminded the roomful of bankers and traders in the basement that closing the stock market could trigger “gutter” markets to spring in the public streets—makeshift markets literally in the gutters of New York. That is precisely what had happened in 1873 and 1914”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“His optimism about American capitalism was unbowed. “No one could doubt that this financial disaster”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Stocks ended 1930 down by a third for the year”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation

“Raskob tried to shift the focus to popular causes like his proposal for the five-day workweek”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation