Crystal

“As the old Russian joke goes, capitalism was the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism was the reverse.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“Indeed, the history of the recruitment of labor is an uninterrupted story of coercion either through the brute force of poverty or more direct regulation, which made a continuation of the old ways impossible”
― Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation

“The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up in his attempt to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria following a failed grenade attack by Princip’s colleague, and gone to a café. It is often said that he got himself a sandwich, which would surely have been the most significant sandwich in history, but it seems more likely that he was standing outside the café without any lunch. By sheer coincidence the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave a surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.”
― J.M.R. Higgs, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century

“Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.”
― Dave Eggers, The Circle