“You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.”
― The Decline of the West
― The Decline of the West
“It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.”
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“I am struck by what a tawdry magician’s trick Time is after all. I am sixty-six years old. Viewed from your coign of vantage—facing toward the future—sixty-six years is a great deal of time. It is all of the experience of your life more than three times over. But, viewed from my coign of vantage—facing toward the past—this sixty-six years was the fluttering down of a cherry petal. I feel that my life was a picture hastily sketched but never filled in . . . for lack of time. Only yesterday—but more than fifty years ago—I walked along this river with my father. I can remember how big and strong his hand felt to my small fingers. Fifty years. But all the insignificant, busy things—the terribly important, now forgotten things that cluttered the intervening time collapse and fall away from my memory. And I remember another yesterday when my daughter was a little girl. We walked along here. At this very moment, the nerves in my hand remember the feeling of her chubby fingers clinging to one of mine.”
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“Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.”
― Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
― Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
― The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Erwin’s 2025 Year in Books
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