“Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.”
“Competitiveness always rests on the assumption of a life-and-death struggle.”
“Nobody loves the rat race, but nobody can think of anything else—Satan has us just where he wants us.”
“Who can be 'agents unto themselves' if they are in bondage to others and have to accept their terms?”
“Can the mere convenience that makes money such a useful device continue indefinitely to outweigh the horrendous and growing burden of evil that it imposes on the human race and ultimately brings its dependents to ruin?”
“The genius of stable societies is that they achieve stability without stagnation, repetition without monotony, conformity with originality, obedience with liberty.”
“Self-justification, that was the danger-- the exhilerating exercise of explaining why my ways are God's ways after all.”
“He gave the side of her head a quick lick before she squealed and ducked away from him. Tasted like Meg. Felt like puppy fuzz. Too bad he couldn’t hold her down and give her a proper grooming like he used to do with Sam.”
“In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”
“It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.”
“You see, in all his travels through the fallen ruins of civilizations, he picked up this notion that mankind is insignificant. That nothing we create will last. That we will all turn to dust. And it is only in nature that we find constancy and immortality.”
“The second conclusion, which is the heart of the book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence and divergence. Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently.”
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