John

“Far more accurately than Jimmy Carter, Reagan understood what made Americans tick: They wanted self-gratification, not self-denial. Although always careful to embroider his speeches with inspirational homilies and testimonials to old-fashioned virtues, Reagan mainly indulged American self-indulgence.”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“Writing over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point. “Not the Constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people,” he wrote, made American democracy possible.4 A half century later, the historian David Potter discovered a similar symbiosis between affluence and liberty. “A politics of abundance,” he claimed, had created the American way of life, “a politics which smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance.”5 William Appleman Williams, another historian, found an even tighter correlation. For Americans, he observed, “abundance was freedom and freedom was abundance.”6”
― Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

“So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.”
― Reid Hoffman, The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career