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“What’s more, a real premium began to be placed on being part of this knowledge oeuvre—not just in what McKinsey knew but in who at McKinsey knew these subject areas. An unstated understanding emerged that if you were a logistics expert in, say, the retail sector and you were called by a partner you had never met who mainly did work with pharmaceutical companies, you would nevertheless return the call. That reputation for contributing was your asset in the firm.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“In 1988 two consultants, Jim Rosenthal and Juan Ocampo, wrote Securitization of Credit, a road map that helped Citibank and Chase Manhattan survive the South American debt crisis. The book, the first on a subject that soon washed over the financial world like a tsunami, showed the banks, unable to earn their way out of their bad debt situation, that by securitizing the loans on their books—packaging them up and selling them into the secondary debt markets—they could effectively walk away from the loans, albeit while still taking a hit to their balance sheets.”
― Duff McDonald, The Firm

“Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. One possible explanation for this is the fact that access to the most elite US universities requires the payment of extremely high tuition fees. Furthermore, these fees rose sharply in the period 1990–2010, following fairly closely the increase in top US incomes, which suggests that the reduced social mobility observed in the United States in the past will decline even more in the future.29 The issue of unequal access to higher education is increasingly a subject of debate in the United States. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10–20 percent in 1970–2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children with parents in the top quartile.30 In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Scientology, as its critics point out, is unlike any other Western religion in that it withholds key aspects of its central theology from all but its most exalted followers. This would be akin to the Catholic Church telling only a select number of the faithful that Jesus Christ died for their sins.”
― Janet Reitman, Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion