E.S.

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“I used to listen to the monks repeating the Lord's Prayer; I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel gratitude to him for doing so nor need to, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can't or won't provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide for his creatures with the necessities, material and spiritual, of existence he'd have done better not to create them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis