Michael Ryan

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“If you hang around the subprime lending business long enough, you'll meet your share of interesting borrowers: strippers, cons, pimps, thugs and various other upstanding citizens of the community. These were not out typical customers. But if a borrower has credit problems and a checkered past, employment gaps and income from unverifiable sources, he usually ends up talking with a subprime lender.”
Richard Bitner, Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider's Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance

“following a [software development] process as agile as a cashier on Quaaludes.”
Eric Brechner, I. M. Wright's Hard Code

Joseph Conrad
“We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean—except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.”
Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest

“If I gun down my boss in the carpark after work then he won't be able to terrorise all his other employees and the greater good will have been served.”
Rushworth M Kidder, How Good People Make Tough Choices

William Shakespeare
“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!”
William Shakespeare, Richard II

year in books
Hanna M...
167 books | 21 friends

Arturo
12,365 books | 61 friends

Roxana
411 books | 49 friends

Lou
Lou
24 books | 17 friends

Kerry Ryan
1 book | 6 friends

Lee
Lee
1,038 books | 45 friends

Gmirabelli
131 books | 1 friend

Sludgie
33 books | 22 friends

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