Bootstrap Quotes

It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise.

Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher place. Start right where you are.

Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had. The childhood other kids around you had. The fact that you could have had a mom who hugged and kissed you when you skinned your knee. Or a dad who stayed and brought you a bouquet of flowers at your graduation. Trauma is mourning the fact that, as an adult, you have to parent yourself. You have to stand in your kitchen, starving, near tears, next to a burnt chicken, and you can’t call your mom to tell her about it, to listen to her tell you that it’s okay, to ask if you can come over for some of her cooking. Instead, you have to pull up your bootstraps and solve the painful puzzle of your life by yourself. What other choice do you have? Nobody else is going to solve it for you.

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, 'Screw you. I’ll take the destruction please.' God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, 'that’s adorable,' and then plunked me down on an entirely different path.

You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.

In Wilson's scale of evaluations breakfast rated just after life itself and ahead of the chance of immortality." ~ By His Bootstraps / Robert A. Heinlein

You can't tell people to pull up on bootstraps when half of them never had any boots to begin with, never even had the chance to get them.

But one may say something and yet not be able to do it. Try, for instance, lifting yourself up by the bootstraps.

SJ: Ah, okay... so you're saying people just need to pull themselves up by their boostraps? Jared: Exactly. SJ: In order to do that, they have to be able to afford boots.

By now you've probably noticed that except when safely contained by quotes, Zampanò always steers clear of such questionable four-letter language. This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool psuedo-academic hogwash lurked a very passionate man who knew how important it was to say "fuck" now and then, and say it loud too, relish its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word really, starting at the lower lip, often the very front of the lower lip, before racing all the way to the back of the throat, where it finishes with a great blast, the concussive force of the K catching up then with the hush of the F already on its way, thus loading it with plenty of offense and edge and certainly ambiguity. FUCK. A great by-the-bootstrap prayer or curse if you prefer, depending on how you look at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself, immersed in all that word-heat.

Irimiás: God is not made manifest in language, you dope. He's not manifest in anything. He doesn't exist... God was a mistake. I've long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of delay. There's no escaping that, stupid.

They tell you in this country that you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And we all believe that. But first you’ve got to have the boots. And the federal government gave Franni’s family the boots.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

The endurance of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative has always relied on people ignoring who’s allowed boots and who’s given the straps with which to pull them up.

FUCK. A great by-the-bootstrap prayer or curse of you prefer, depending on how you look at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

...it is cruel jest to say to a BOOTLESS man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something.” “Well, didn’t you? You were there.” “No, I didn’t—no… well, maybe I did, but it didn’t feel like it.” “Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience.” “But… but—” Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. “It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That’s silly.” “Well, didn’t you?" ~ By His Bootstraps / Robert A. Heinlein

I call you metaphysicians because you reason metaphysically," Ernest went on. "Your method of reasoning is the opposite to that of science. There is no validity to your conclusions. You can prove everything and nothing, and no two of you can agree upon anything. Each of you goes into his own consciousness to explain himself and the universe. As well may you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to explain consciousness by consciousness.

This instance in particular proves that beneath all that cool pseudo-academic hogwash lurked a very passionate man who knew how important it was to say "fuck" now and then, and say it loud too, relish its syllabic sweetness, its immigrant pride, a great American epic word really, starting at the lower lip , often the very front of the lower lip, before racing all the way to the back of the throat, where it finishes with a great blast, the concussive force of the K catching up then with the hush of the F already on its way, thus loading it with plenty of offense and edge and certainly ambiguity. FUCK. A great by-the-bootstrap prayer or curse of you prefer, depending on how you look at it, or use it, suited perfectly for hurling at the skies or at the world, or sometimes, if said just right, for uttering with enough love and fire, the woman beside you melts inside herself.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

To use the human metaphor, it would be like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. It can’t be done.

Finally, to everyone who still insists they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps: For fuck’s sake, look up the origin of the saying.

In our community, there is an ingrained idea that if you are sick, it’s a weakness, a symptom of our internalized bootstraps mythology.

The question is, how can the rest of the country live knowing that so many of us have to live like this?

The average Negro is born into want and deprivation. His struggle to escape his circumstances is hindered by color discrimination. He is deprived of normal education and normal social and economic opportunities. When he seeks opportunity, he is told, in effect, to lift himself by his own bootstraps, advice which does not take into account the fact that he is barefoot.

But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices—the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered—the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation.

Some people have the luxury of asking themselves whether a job fulfills their career hopes and ambitions. I’ve got my own metric to gauge the fabulosity of a job: Does that job require me to keep my boss informed of the inner workings of my gastrointestinal system, or am I allowed to go to the bathroom at will?

Fairness is one of the most compelling claims of the American Dream, a vision of success propelled by hard work, determination, and maybe the occasional pair of bootstraps.

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

I am not, for all my frustration, opposed to capitalism. Most Americans, poor ones included, aren’t. We like the idea that anyone can succeed. What I am opposed to is the sort of capitalism that sucks the life out of a whole bunch of the citizenry and then demands that they do better with whatever they have left. If we could just agree that poor people are doing the necessary grunt work and that there is dignity in that too, we’d be able to make it less onerous.

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb.

America’s original sin, our fundamental delusion: the bootstrap ethos, the notion that the comfortable deserve their place, that capitalism is an opportunity for the exploited to prove themselves, that success is a proportional reflection of hard work, that the rich are rich because they are good and smart.

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

He helped me see the beauty in death alongside the inescapable finality. Also, he taught me that when somethin’ scares you, you pull your bootstraps up and give it the finger, so it knows who it’s messin’ with.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step . . . . Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher place. Start right where you are.

...the priests of all these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the poor; or when the Sunday-school Superintendent of the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters shakes the hand of one of his Colorado mine-slaves. But for the most part the priests and preachers of Bootstrap-lifting walk haughtily erect, many of them being so swollen with prosperity that they could not reach their bootstraps if they wanted to. Their role in life is to exhort other men to more vigorous efforts at self-elevation, that the agents of the Wholesale Pickpockets' Association may ply their immemorial role with less chance of interference.

When Bootsie was old enough to go to high school, Fran got herself a $300 GI loan to enroll at the University of Maine. She got three more loans and graduated with a teaching degree. Because she taught Title I kids—poor kids—all her loans were forgiven. Every member of Franni’s family made it to the middle class. And they did it because of Social Security, Pell Grants, the GI Bill, and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. They tell you in this country that you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And we all believe that. But first you’ve got to have the boots. And the federal government gave Franni’s family the boots.

Such an AI might also be able to produce a detailed blueprint for how to bootstrap from existing technology (such as biotechnology and protein engineering) to the constructor capabilities needed for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing that would allow inexpensive fabrication of a much wider range of nanomechanical structures.

There is a myth in this country that the way out of poverty is to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” that by sheer force of will one can change the course of one’s life, no matter how great the obstacles. But in all my years reporting, I’ve never once spoken to someone who came from abject poverty and transcended that path without help.

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

The reason that poor people wind up coping in ways that seem pointlessly self-destructive is that all the constructive stuff costs money. I

Every self is an argument trying to prove its identity

Having the least usually forces us to make the most of what we have.

Because a bunch of dudes beating on one dude who was already on the ground until he's brain damaged and broken is wrong. Because prosecuting people differently for the same exact crimes because of skin color is wrong. Because some people being able to buy private islands while other people sleep outside on the ground is wrong. Because knowingly destroying poor communities with drugs let in to fund wars against foreign regimes is fundamentally wrong. Because even though you finally enact a Civil Rights Act not even thirty years ago, it doesn't erase centuries of unequal wealth, unequal access, unequal schooling, unequal living conditions, unequal policing. You can't tell people to pull up on bootstraps when half of them never had any boots to begin with, never even had the chance to get them. Or when you let people burn whole, thriving black communities to the ground and conveniently forget about it. Because maybe the problem isn't only with "bad" people, maybe the problem is with the whole system.

As a tool, evolution is good for three things: How to get somewhere you want but can't find the route to. How to get to somewhere you can't imagine. How to open up entirely new places to get to

How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn't supposed to be here? Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn't in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of his pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance. He had only heard tell of his great-grandpa H from Ma Willie, but those stories were enough to make him weep and to fill him with pride. Two-Shovel H they had called him. But what had they called his father or his father before him? What of the mothers? They had been products of their time, and walking in Birmingham now, Marcus was an accumulation of these times. That was the point.

If you think poor people are entitled, try denying a rich person with an attitude some service they think they’ve earned. It’s like grief—there are phases. Anger and denial are first. Then comes “do you understand how fucked you are if I don’t get the thing I want?” Followed by “I demand to see your manager” and “I’ve never been treated so poorly in my life.” The final stage is bargaining, where they try to give you extra money because all of life is like valet service to them, and an extra five bucks can change the world. If

The call to delight in our heavenly Father is not one that can be rightly obeyed with bootstrap effort. One cannot grimly determine to rejoice in the grace of God. The only way to rejoice the way David did is to be overcome with emotion. David's joyous dance was true to who he was and true to how he felt about God. It was David becoming like a child, so much so that he insisted on giving in to his willingness, even his eagerness, to become undignified.

listening to Pastor Bob talk about mercy and redemption, I am filled with hope. Not the kind of expectation that comes from knowing you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, but the trust that comes from utter failure, from knowing you are pathetic and small and you’ve got no place to look but up.

How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

She will choose a bath over a shower, a play over a movie, and the ocean over a pool. She has saved herself from intense pain in her life with strong, pulled-up bootstraps and terrifying organizational skills. She has the legs for tennis, the grace for skiing, and such high-arched eyebrows they could bring the Supreme Court to their knees.

Learning HTML and CSS is a lot more challenging than it used to be. Responsive web design adds more layers of complexity to design and develop websites.

It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps. It is even worse to tell a man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps when somebody is standing on the boot....I had to tell him finally that nobody else in this country has lifted themselves by their own bootstraps alone, so why expect the black man to do it?

Equilibrium is dead,

Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be.

a two-column layout, we place it right after the second column. To be safe, just in case the same problem arises when the page is displayed as a four-column layout, we also put:

We have decided to lock people up for social deviancy these days. We tell ourselves that we’re not running debtors’ prisons, that this isn’t Dickensian

Telling an individual company to do better is a lot like telling an individual poor person to save more—true and helpful, but not so easy in practice.

Whatʼs a bootstrapper to do? You have to go where the other guys canʼt. Take advantage of what you have so that you can beat the competition with what they donʼt.

I think the sorts of people who honestly think that service workers should be more smiley and gracious just don’t get it. They don’t get it because they can take so much for granted in their own lives—things like respect, consideration, and basic fairness on the job. Benefits. Insurance. They’re used to the luxury of choosing the most aesthetically pleasing item on the shelf, of caring what color their car is rather than simply whether it runs or not. They don’t understand how depressing it is to be barely managing your life at any given moment of the day. So forgive me if I don’t tell you to have a pleasant day with unfeigned enthusiasm when I hand you your fucking hamburger. You’ll have to settle for the fake sort.

The logic is that if you’ve got excess money and throw it away on booze and cigarettes, then that’s your business. But if you’re poor, then that’s a sin and a shame. Because if you’re poor, rich people assume you’re on welfare, or you’re getting food stamps or some other social services. Once you take a penny from the government, a morality clause goes into effect, where you’re never allowed to have anything that you might actually enjoy. It’s the hair shirt of welfare.

Humanity cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation; life does not come from crystals; poetry does not come from donkeys; international peace does not come from wars; social justice does not come from selfishness. With all our knowledge of chemistry we cannot make a human life in our laboratories because we lack the unifying, vivifying principal of a soul which comes only from God. Life is not a push from below; it is a gift from above. It is not the result of the necessary ascent of man but the loving descent of God.

It’s a very colonizing impulse to look at something—a land, a city, a culture—and instead of seeing what is there, see a barren landscape that needs your new ideas. It’s an American impulse to see a problem and think you can solve it with a little hard work and some bootstraps. It’s a deeply human impulse to look all around you and see a problem but never consider that you might be the actual problem.

Filth, filth, filth, from morning to night. I know they're poor but they could wash. Water is free and soap is cheap. Just look at that arm, nurse.' The nurse looked and clucked in horror. Francie stood there with the hot flamepoints of shame burning her face. The doctor was a Harvard man, interning at the neighborhood hospital. Once a week, he was obliged to put in a few hours at one of the free clinics. He was going into a smart practice in Boston when his internship was over. Adopting the phraseology of the neighborhood, he referred to his Brooklyn internship as going through Purgatory, when he wrote to his socially prominent fiancee in Boston. The nurse was as Williamsburg girl... The child of poor Polish immigrants, she had been ambitious, worked days in a sweatshop and gone to school at night. Somehow she had gotten her training... She didn't want anyone to know she had come from the slums. After the doctor's outburst, Francie stood hanging her head. She was a dirty girl. That's what the doctor meant. He was talking more quietly now asking the nurse how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn't breed anymore. Did that mean he wanted her to die? Would he do something to make her die because her hands and arms were dirty from the mud pies? She looked at the nurse... She thought the nurse might say something like: Maybe this little girl's mother works and didn't have time to wash her good this morning,' or, 'You know how it is, Doctor, children will play in the dirt.' But what the nurse actuallly said was, 'I know, Isn't it terrible? I sympathize with you, Doctor. There is no excuse for these people living in filth.' A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise. When the needle jabbed, Francie never felt it. The waves of hurt started by the doctor's words were racking her body and drove out all other feeling. While the nurse was expertly tying a strip of gauze around her arm and the doctor was putting his instrument in the sterilizer and taking out a fresh needle, Francie spoke up. My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be suprised. And you don't have to tell him. You told me.' They stared at this bit of humanity who had become so strangely articulate. Francie's voice went ragged with a sob. 'You don't have to tell him. Besides it won't do no godd. He's a boy and he don't care if he is dirty.'... As the door closed, she heard the doctor's suprised voice. I had no idea she'd understand what I was saying.' She heard the nurse say, 'Oh, well,' on a sighing note.

Countless aid organizations and governments are convinced that they know what poor people need, and invest in schools, solar panels, or cattle. And, granted, better a cow than no cow. But at what cost? A Rwandan study estimated that donating one pregnant cow costs around $3,000 (including a milking workshop). That’s five years’ wages for a Rwandan.17 Or take the patchwork of courses offered to the poor: Study after study has shown that they cost a lot but achieve little, whether the objective is learning to fish, read, or run a business.18 “Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It’s not about stupidity,” stresses the economist Joseph Hanlon. “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.”19 The great thing about money is that people can use it to buy things they need instead of things that self-appointed experts think they need. And, as it happens, there is one category of product which poor people do not spend their free money on, and that’s alcohol and tobacco. In fact, a major study by the World Bank demonstrated that in 82% of all researched cases in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, alcohol and tobacco consumption actually declined.20

The first step off this downward spiral is to acknowledge these bad feelings as natural. When women feel this way, our society has sympathy, and Oprah gives them cars. But when men feel this way, our society demonizes these feelings as signs of weakness, amplifying the shame and self-judgment, repeating the macho advice to “suck it up” and “get over it.” This bullshit makes the problem worse. It’s impossible to pull yourself out of depression by your bootstraps when all you want to do is hang yourself with them. Bad advice can’t fix bad feelings, and neither can ignoring those feelings. Don’t try to push them away or pretend they’re not there. These feelings evolved to protect us from harm, like our fight-or-flight responses.

What's better- supply side economics a la John Keynes, or libertarian free markets a la Milton Friedman? Safety nets or bootstraps to build a just society? Big sticks or carrots to preserve international order? Federal or states' rights to guide the governed? Investing in education or employment to empower a citizenry? Seperation or integration of church and state? Multicultural melting pot or national identity? Revolution or evolution? The only honest answer is "it depends." and we're not entirely sure.

I didn't invent the difficulty of depending on people. It's not a personality flaw of mine. The message is everywhere. The air is saturated with it -- independence and strength and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (an image that is by its very nature impossible.) "Take complete responsibility for your life," they say, as if the external forces don't matter at all. As if it all comes down to personal effort and attitude. As if money, support, and privilege had nothing to do with how your life turns out.

Never mind that some children might not want to grow up to run a business, that some might rather be teachers or mechanics, or even nothing in particular just yet; forget that imagination and creativity might be something other than a source of wealth. The cult of entrepreneurship’s commodification of imagination, its celebration of self-sacrifice, and its bootstraps individualism make it a perfect ethic for social disinvestment masquerading as reform and profiteering disguised as charity. Entrepreneurship means that now you’re on your own, kid.

Being poor is something like always being followed around by violins making “tense” movie music. You know that commercial where the band Survivor follows a guy around playing “Eye of the Tiger”? Yeah, it’s like that, but the musicians are invisible and they’re playing the shower scene from Psycho.

In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man's (nos so often a woman's ) ability and right to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and wit, which lies at the heart of that dream, has produced more Oswalds, more Sirhans, more Mansons and Jim Joneses, than Lincolns, of late. The representative figure of American individualism is no longer that log-cabin-to-White-House President, but rather a lone man with a gun, seeking vengeance against a world that will not conform to his own sense of what has worth.

He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African Witch Doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him "YOU LIE!" He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to "take the country back."If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left?

Poverty is when a quarter is a fucking miracle. Poor is when a dollar is a miracle. Broke is when five dollars is a miracle. Working class is being broke, but doing so in a place that might not be so worn down. Middle class is is being able to own some toys and to live in a nice place... And rich is anything above that.

He discovered that the science he’d once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general. The questions he had asked about infinite hypotheses hadn’t been of interest to science because they weren’t scientific questions. Science cannot study scientific method without getting into a bootstrap problem that destroys the validity of its answers. The questions he’d asked were at a higher level than science goes. And so Phaedrus found in philosophy a natural continuation of the question that brought him to science in the first place, What does it all mean? What’s the purpose of all this?

Living in low-income neighborhoods, I've seen sexual health campaigns aimed at slut-shaming us into celibacy. They talk about things like self-esteem and value and all the usual abstinence arguments. They assume that our bodies are a gift that we should bestow selectively on others, rather than the one thing that can never be anything but our own. Even if we do share it, it is ours irrevocably. These are the bodies that hold the brains we're supposed to shut off all day at work, the same bodies that aren't important enough to heal. These are the bodies that come with the genitalia that we should be so protective of? I really don't understand the logic. You can't tell us that our brains and labor and emotions are worth next to nothing and then expect us to get all full of intrinsic worth when it comes to our genitals. Either we're cheap or we're not. Make up your fucking mind.

There are in the world no such men as self-made men. The term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “SELF-MADE MEN

You will fall in love with someone who you will have to walk away from, because they don’t love you. You must accept the fact that they don’t have your best interests in mind. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but you must swallow it for you own the sake. You have nothing further to prove to them love yourself enough to grab your bootstraps pick yourself up and keep moving

I polled several friends to see how much time they would grant between "a blinding, bad time" and a life that has simply become a depressive waste; the consensus was around seven years. This bespeaks the generosity of my friends -- I imagine most Americans would give themselves a year, maybe two, before they castigated themselves into some form of yanking up the bootstraps.

She looked at the nurse. To Francie, all women were mamas like her own mother and Aunt Sissy and Aunt Evy. She thought the nurse might say something like: "Maybe this little girl's mother works and didn't have time to wash her good this morning," or, "You know how it is, Doctor, children will play in dirt." But what the nurse actually said was, "I know. Isn't it terrible? I sympathize with you, Doctor. There is no excuse for these people living in filth." A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the boot-strap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel up climb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise.

If you’re going to put as little as possible into my training and wages, if you’re going to make sure that I can’t get enough hours to survive in order to avoid giving me health care, and generally make sure that I’m as uncomfortable as possible at any given time just to make sure I know my place, then how can you expect me to care about your profit margin? Remember, you get what you pay for.

I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

Given the choice between building a thriving, profitable business with a niche and a really boring product and putting your life savings into an intensely competitive business where youʼre likely to fail but the product is cool, the experienced bootstrapper will pick the former every time. If you find an industry filled with wannabe entrepreneurs with a dollar and a dream, run away and look for something else!

(Post Katrina) . . . He was reminded of the first time he'd run on a track with spikes. "You just fly on the track." The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren't. "There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.

Day care was intended from the start to be a weak system, as scholars of the history of childcare tell me, like a punishment for needing care because a woman didn’t have a husband or some other means of support.

On one side was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s right-hand man since the Revolution and the architect of the hated whiskey tax. Hamilton came from humble beginnings in the Caribbean but had pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps to quickly gain acceptance among the elite power brokers of New York finance. During the Revolution, he was assigned to Washington’s staff and impressed the general, quickly becoming one of Washington’s most trusted advisers. After the war, he was appointed as the first treasury secretary at the age of thirty-two. From that lofty perch he championed industry and big finance and wrote the whiskey tax to promote the advancement of larger, more established distilleries on the East Coast, to the detriment of smaller frontier distilleries. His grave today rests in his adopted city of New York, in a cemetery at the top of Wall Street.

I have a Republican friend and every time we get into politics and the economy, he tells me that I simply don’t understand the American dream. He says it doesn’t make sense to punish the people you’re trying to join. He is fairly certain that in the next decade or two, he will be worried about capital gains. He works at Wal-Mart. He’s nearing thirty. No degree, no real résumé, no particular ambition to do anything. Just a firm conviction that someday he’ll have a fantastic high-powered career doing . . . something. He’s not sure what, only that this is America and anyone can make it. While he’s waiting, he’ll be protecting his future interests at the ballot box.

Baron von Munchausen (1720–97) was a real person who had fought as a soldier in Russia. On his return home he told stories about his exploits that nobody believed. These included riding on a cannonball, taking a brief trip to the moon, and escaping from a marsh by pulling himself out by his own hair. This latter feat is impossible, for the upward force on the Baron’s hair would have been cancelled out by the downward force on his arm. It’s a nice idea, though, and von Munchausen’s preposterous principle was later taken up by Americans, but instead of talking about hair, the Americans started in the late nineteenth century to talk of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. What’s impossible in physics is possible in computing, and a computer that’s able to load its own programs is, metaphorically, pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. In 1953 the process was called a bootstrap. By 1975 people had got bored with the strap, and from then on computers simply booted up.

George Pelecanos: This is what I think we did best: we showed people how things work, why things are the way they are. ...if you came up the way I did, you've been hearing all your life, "Why can't these kids just pull themselves up by their bootstraps to get out of the ghetto?" Like it's easy. I think in that season [three/four], we showed America why it's very difficult for them to do that, because of everything they're up against. That's really what I'm proud of, is that we articulated on film the mechanics of why things are the way they are. (257)

The entrepreneur is comfortable raising money, hiring and firing, renting more office space than she needs right now. The entrepreneur must dream big and persuade others to share her dream. The freelancer, on the other hand, can focus on craft. She can most easily build her business by doing great work, consistently.

Herzog and Hertwig then averaged the two estimates thus produced. Their technique, which they named dialectical bootstrapping, produced larger improvements in accuracy than did a simple request for a second estimate immediately following the first. Because the participants forced themselves to consider the question in a new light, they sampled another, more different version of themselves—two “members” of the “crowd within” who were further apart. As a result, their average produced a more accurate estimate of the truth. The gain in accuracy with two immediately consecutive “dialectical” estimates was about half the value of a second opinion.

It's an insidious twist of thought that leads one to demand women to give up their reproductive rights to force unwanted pregnancies but then, once birthed from the womb, to deny them access to basic necessities required for even a mediocre life like education, clean air, healthcare, and a fair wage. And these people have the audacity to call their position pro-life. These same people who bemoan the welfare state, yet refuse to require business to honor a fair wage, appear to want to create the very circumstances that they ceaselessly complain about. I dare say that by perpetuating this condition, by feeding the apparatus of poverty, they are satiating their narcissism. With poverty securely entrenched, these lucky few can sit back and smile with smug superiority. Because of course, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they worked harder, and they have earned what they have. It's a meritocracy, they say, if only by merit of their parent's color of flesh or social standing. So yes, let's churn out more children who will be unable to claw their way out of poverty, and if they just happen to defy the odds, let's brainwash them into believing this tripe called the American Dream so they will assist us as we throw their less fortunate fortunate siblings into the hungry machine of conservatism. Because we are really only interested in conserving the status quo.

But what does that say about aspirational living? Hey, you moved into a big house and you made it...except you didn't. There's this idea that you will be safe if you just get famous enough, successful enough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, move into the right neighborhood, do all these things to fully assimilate into the America people have been sold on. We all bought in, and we keep thinking if we just get over this mountain of assimilation, on the other side is a pot of gold. Or maybe a unicorn, perhaps a leprechaun. Any of those is as plausible as the acceptance of the wholeness of me. But there's just another mountain on the other side. And someone will be ready to tell you, "Don't be breathing hard. You need to make this look easy.

The report is more persuasive in describing the department’s shoddy record-keeping and the lax oversight of beat cops. The failure to supervise officers’ use of force results in excessive resort to Tasers. Equally problematic is Ferguson’s practice of issuing a quasi-warrant known as a “wanted” without the requisite probable cause to believe that the target has committed a crime. (Many other departments abuse “wanteds,” too.) The municipal court, like the police department, is error-prone in its records and notice systems. Had the Justice Department blasted Ferguson’s management and training failures and left it at that, it would have been on solid footing. But the imperative to racialize the problems was overwhelming, especially given Holder’s previous statements against Ferguson and the subsequent discrediting of the Brown story. So the department trots out the usual statistical analyses with which to bootstrap a charge of “intentional discrimination” against blacks. And these statistical analyses are irredeemably deficient.

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,” Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are not programmed, they learn.”27 But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28 This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect: perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions, appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals. Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond what we humans program it to do. There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?