Cheap Is Expensive Quotes

Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

Never use the word “cheap”. Today everybody can look chic in inexpensive clothes (the rich buy them too). There is good clothing design on every level today. You can be the chicest thing in the world in a T-shirt and jeans — it’s up to you.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

Rules for Living by Olivia Joules 1. Never panic. Stop, breathe, think. 2. No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you. 3. Never change haircut or color before an important event. 4. Nothing is either as bad or good as it seems. 5. Do as you would be done by, e.g. thou shalt not kill. 6. It is better to buy one expensive thing that you really like than several cheap ones that you only quite like. 7. Hardly anything matters: if you get upset, ask yourself, "Does it really matter?" 8. The key to success lies in how you pick yourself up from failure. 9. Be honest and kind. 10. Only buy clothes that make you feel like doing a small dance. 11. Trust your instincts, not your overactive imagination. 12. When overwhelmed by disaster, check if it's really a disaster by doing the following: (a) think, "Oh, fuck it," (b) look on the bright side, and if that doesn't work, look on the funny side. If neither of the above works then maybe it is a disaster so turn to items 1 and 4. 13. Don't expect the world to be safe or life to be fair.

Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper.

When I was a kid, I learned the hard way how expensive the truth was. Sometimes it cost you people in your life. Sometimes it cost you things in your life. And in this life, most people were too cheap to pay the price for something as valuable as honesty.

If talk is cheap, then being silent is expensive. And many people it seems, can't afford to buy into it.

No, no, no. There's no such thing as cheap and cheerful. It's cheap and nasty & expensive and cheerful.

You'd be surprised how expensive it costs to look this cheap.

If you lack the iron and the fuzz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”   TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO

I never believed in Santa Claus. None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn't afford expensive presents and they didn't want us to think we weren't as good as other kids who, on Christmas morning, found all sorts of fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by Santa Claus. Dad had lost his job at the gypsum, and when Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each one of us kids out into the desert night one by one. "Pick out your favorite star", Dad said. "I like that one!" I said. Dad grinned, "that's Venus", he said. He explained to me that planets glowed because reflected light was constant and stars twinkled because their light pulsed. "I like it anyway" I said. "What the hell," Dad said. "It's Christmas. You can have a planet if you want." And he gave me Venus. Venus didn't have any moons or satellites or even a magnetic field, but it did have an atmosphere sort of similar to Earth's, except it was super hot-about 500 degrees or more. "So," Dad said, "when the sun starts to burn out and Earth turns cold, everyone might want to move to Venus to get warm. And they'll have to get permission from your descendants first. We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa myth and got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. "Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten," Dad said, "you'll still have your stars.

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.

If you could buy time, I would sell it. Yesterday would be expensive, and tomorrow would be cheap.

All the men send you orchids because they're expensive and they know that you know they are. But I always kind of think they're cheap, don't you, just because they're expensive. Like telling someone how much you paid for something to show off.

You know a man is interesting when you forget to notice how expensive — or cheap — his clothes are.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The Intelligent Investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

most expensive originals have cheap imitations.

They shot him. A few times. Mistakes were expensive and bullets were cheap.

When I look at you, I see something broken that isn’t worth fixing. And you look at me like I’m a cheap thing to replace the expensive one that’s been stolen from you. See, we’re all vases. And you’re the one scattered on the floor, shattered beyond repair. So I’ll let someone else pick you up. It’s really that simple. Have fun with your temporary glue.

I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasn't shiny, no - shiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what I'm saying

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.

I want to be able to listen to recording of piano sonatas and know who's playing. I want to go to classical concerts and know when you're meant to clap. I want to be able to 'get' modern jazz without it all sounding like this terrible mistake, and I want to know who the Velvet Underground are exactly. I want to be fully engaged in the World of Ideas, I want to understand complex economics, and what people see in Bob Dylan. I want to possess radical but humane and well-informed political ideals, and I want to hold passionate but reasoned debates round wooden kitchen tables, saying things like 'define your terms!' and 'your premise is patently specious!' and then suddenly to discover that the sun's come up and we've been talking all night. I want to use words like 'eponymous' and 'solipsistic' and 'utilitarian' with confidence. I want to learn to appreciate fine wines, and exotic liquers, and fine single malts, and learn how to drink them without turning into a complete div, and to eat strange and exotic foods, plovers' eggs and lobster thermidor, things that sound barely edible, or that I can't pronounce...Most of all I want to read books; books thick as brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, second-hand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foregin universities. At some point I'd like to have an original idea...And all of these are the things that a university education's going to give me.

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.

Don't open the door to strangers," said her dad. "Unless they're selling something. Then open the door and see if I'd like it. If I'd like it, buy it for me. But nothing cheap. I have standards. Nothing too expensive, either. My standards aren't that high.

Thoughts are free, talk is cheap, and action is expensive. What's your worth?

The question isn't why organic food is so darned expensive, it's really about why chemically sprayed, poisoned food is so cheap.

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

That who sold the expensive for no price, bought the cheap with the highest price.

I’m a girl of simple tastes. I like cheap wine and expensive cheese.

t was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there may be just wars and unjust wars, there are never any cheap wars.

Bruised knees cramp my style. They scream cheap whore, when I am an expensive one.

But what are best friends for, if not to gain a cheap laugh at your expense?

I take a sip of the expensive wine Brock poured for me. The expensive bottles are by far better than the cheap ones, but I can never detect all the subtle notes of honeydew or lavender or whatever. He keeps asking me, and now I’m lying and telling him that I can tell, but I really can’t. I’m faking wine.

...whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illness, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water -- of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don't care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.

She made a face and looked up at him. “I wish you would do it. Couldn’t I hire you? Indefinitely? How expensive are you?” His mouth quirked, his eyes suddenly hard and humorless. “At face value, I’m cheap. But I come with hidden costs.” Drawing closer, Phoebe hugged herself to him and laid her head against his chest. Eventually his arms lifted around her, and the pressure of his cheek came to her hair. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll make sure you have whatever you need.” You’re what I need, she thought.

North Americans had two distinct ways of looking at food trends brought from other cultures: foreign and ethnic. Foreign was refined, upmarket, and expensive. Ethnic was exotic, downmarket, and cheap. French and Japanese were foreign. Chinese, Mexican, and Indian were ethnic. With ethnic, “people start to complain if a meal costs more than $10,

Similarly, though the United States is one of the world’s richest economies by per capita income, it ranks only around seventeenth in reported life satisfaction. It is superseded not only by the likely candidates of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, which all rank above the United States but also by less likely candidates such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, one might surmise that it is health and longevity rather than income that give the biggest boost to reported life satisfaction. Since good health and longevity can be achieved at per capita income levels well below those of the United States, so too can life satisfaction. One marketing expert put it this way, with only slight exaggeration: Basic Survival goods are cheap, whereas narcissistic self-stimulation and social-display products are expensive. Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.

Most Religions are Social Clubs with expensive Entertainment Cheap Wine and Stale Crackers

Those who say traveling is expensive, are just ill-informed.

Before I was married I learned the difference between a cheap and expensive wine after I was married I learned to drink the cheap wine.

But fear is a cheap emotion, however full of wisdom. And, emotionally speaking, I've always thought of myself as a man of expensive taste.

Not because of my words—those are cheap and untrustworthy. But because of my actions, which are expensive and trustworthy.

the most expensive champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale.

One thing I’ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.

Talk is cheap; but consequences are damn expensive.

This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand self-hate that leads some to razors or pills or swan dives off beautiful bridges however tragic that is. This is the shame of seeing yourself, of being ashamed of where you live and what your father’s paycheck lets you eat and wear. This is the shame of the fat and the bald, the unbearable blush of acne, the shame of having no lunch money and pretending you’re not hungry. This is the shame of concealed sickness—diseases too expensive to afford that offer only their cold one-way ticket out. This is the shame of being ashamed, the self-disgust of the cheap wine drunk, the lassitude that makes junk accumulate, the shame that tells you there is another way to live but you are too dumb to find it. This is the real shame, the damned shame, the crying shame, the shame that’s criminal, the shame of knowing words like glory are not in your vocabulary though they litter the Bibles you’re still paying for. This is the shame of not knowing how to read and pretending you do. This is the shame that makes you afraid to leave your house, the shame of food stamps at the supermarket when the clerk shows impatience as you fumble with the change. This is the shame of dirty underwear, the shame of pretending your father works in an office as God intended all men to do. This is the shame of asking friends to let you off in front of the one nice house in the neighborhood and waiting in the shadows until they drive away before walking to the gloom of your house. This is the shame at the end of the mania for owning things, the shame of no heat in winter, the shame of eating cat food, the unholy shame of dreaming of a new house and car and the shame of knowing how cheap such dreams are. © Vern Rutsala

Basically, he used to say, the term cheap did not apply to something inessential: even if something cost only an as, you should regard it as something expensive if it was not something you needed- Cato the Elder

The five following are the principal circumstances which, (...), make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others. First, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.

She was, probably, the nicest person I had ever known. Yet in the years following, for myself, I abandoned even believing in niceness or being nice. I could scarcely control myself, wherever I was, from telling everyone, anyone, what I thought of them. It was an urge, a compulsion, my tongue bitten a futile blue. That's a ridiculous thing to say. You must have been spoiled as a child. I couldn't stop myself. You are ungenerous. You parcel yourself out like an expensive spice. You idealize things; you're a narcissist. You seek only to etch impressions of yourself on someone else's face. It's a form of cheapness. You're cheap. You're patronizing. You're a fascist. You're a bully. I've always hated bullies. You look awful in that color. It was as if I'd been hit on the head.

Most people do not mind having a house that is smaller and/or a car that is cheaper than their neighbours’, as long as they each earn and have more money than their neighbours, and, equally important, their neighbours know that.

I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value. I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. I also knew that if I lost my job, all I would lose with it was the miserable salary, the contempt I could read every day in the eyes of the higher level executives when they looked at the lesser female officials, the humiliating pressure of male bodies on mine when I rode in the bus, and the long morning queue in front of a perpetually overflowing toilet.

The vast increase in spending on border security has inadvertently transformed the people-smuggling business from an optional, cheap, amateur affair into a near-compulsory, very expensive, and cartel-dominated one. It is a gift to organized crime.

How the promise of cheap, competitive and unlimited telecommunications service has been turned into a reality of expensive, monopolistic and limited service is just one part of the larger transformation in the American economy since the late 1970s.

drive through hell the people are weary, unhappy and frustrated, the people are bitter and vengeful, the people are deluded and fearful, the people are angry and uninventive and I drive among them on the freeway and they project what is left of themselves in their manner of driving— some more hateful, more thwarted than others— some don’t like to be passed, some attempt to keep others from passing —some attempt to block lane changes —some hate cars of a newer, more expensive model —others in these cars hate the older cars. the freeway is a circus of cheap and petty emotions, it’s humanity on the move, most of them coming from some place they hated and going to another they hate just as much or more. the freeways are a lesson in what we have become and most of the crashes and deaths are the collision of incomplete beings, of pitiful and demented lives. when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it’s ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away.

Imagine if all the car makers in the world were to sit down together to design one extremely simple, embellishment-free, functional car that was made from the most environmentally-sustainable materials, how cheap to buy and humanity-and-Earth-considerate that vehicle would be. And imagine all the money that would be saved by not having different car makers duplicating their efforts, competing and trying to out-sell each other, and overall how much time that would liberate for all those people involved in the car industry to help those less fortunate and suffering in the world. Likewise, imagine when each house is no longer designed to make an individualised, ego-reinforcing, status-symbol statement for its owners and all houses are constructed in a functionally satisfactory, simple way, how much energy, labour, time and expense will be freed up to care for the wellbeing of the less fortunate and the planet.

They [best dressed women] don’t want to look like their daughters. They want their own individual brand of chic. […] The cut and fit must be exactly right, and they are willing to spend hours in the fitting room to make sure of it. They spend money, too. But if any one of them went broke tomorrow she’d rather choose one perfectly cut expensive dress and make it do for years than buy a dozen cheap ones.

With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture, and this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls. You think just because you've made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can't, because you'll never be anything but a common frump, whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing. With this money, I can get away from every rotten, stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you!

Another problem with service-level decoupling is that it is expensive, both in development time and in system resources. Dealing with service boundaries where none are needed is a waste of effort, memory, and cycles. And, yes, I know that the last two are cheap—but the first is not.

False cultural constructs tell us that pasta can be expensive, while noodles have to be cheap. The same dichotomy exists between almost any Asian (or African or Latin American) dish and its Western analogue. To me, there is literally no other explanation than racism. Don’t even try to talk to me about how the price differential is a result of service and decor. That shit is paid for by people who are willing to spend money on safe, “non-ethnic” food.

Talk is cheap, action is expensive.

Cheap, Donny's mother would say. It's an enticing word. Most of the things in his life are expensive, and not very interesting.

Whatever comes to you in a cheap way will vanish in a cheap way. Be patient and earn it the hard way.

You're a precious treasure and if they are serious about you, let them hunt you and pay the expensive price you deserve to get you. Don't settle for cheap!!

Clear and plain glass is considered cheap while the same glass if tinted with color is considered expensive. that's today's world. It's better to be tinted than being clear.

Capitalism always draws from the cheap labor pool; the profit is greater when the expense is limited

Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels but $14 a night at expensive ones.

A lot of religions are 'Social Clubs' with strange rules, expensive entertainment, cheap wine and stale crackers.

Thinking is cheap. Action is expensive.

If there's anything romcoms have taught us about spontaneous gifting, it's that the big expensive presents are often a sign of guilt. But not the small, sort of rubbish presents. It seems to me that a cheap bag of crisps says a whole lot more than a gold necklace. It says 'You occupy such a vast space in my mind, I think of you so constantly, that my day-to-day life throws up constant reminders of you.' That person is, subconsciously or not, considered in everything you do and everywhere you go. Even in somewhere as mundane as the supermarket snack aisle.

In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women’s skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.

The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented....So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids of f the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway....the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it's going, there'll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you'll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that's not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile. WE have to find some other way....So I started imagining....Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given over to front and back lawns, would be common too. And there could be vegetable gardens, and fields and woods for the kids to play in. There's be problems about somebody picking the tomatoes somebody else planted, or the roses, or the kids trampling through the pea patch, but the fifty groups or individuals who lived in the houses would have complete charge and complete responsibility for what went on in their little enclave. At the other side of the houses, facing the, would be a little community center. It would have a community laundry -- why does everybody have to own a washing machine?-- and some playrooms and a little cafe and a communal kitchen. The cafe would be an outdoor one, with sliding glass panels to close it in in winter, like the ones in Paris. This wouldn't be a full commune: everybody would have their own way of earning a living, everybody would retain their own income, and the dwellings would be priced according to size. Each would have a little kitchen, in case people wanted to eat alone, a good-sized living space, but not enormous, because the community center would be there. Maybe the community center would be beautiful, lush even. With playrooms for the kids and the adults, and sitting rooms with books. But everyone in the community, from the smallest walking child, would have a job in it.

Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work done with simple efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eight hours a day instead of ten or fifteen.

The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You’re just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often). This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best (perhaps only) strategy for growth.

Mexican Loneliness" And I am an unhappy stranger grooking in the streets of Mexico- My friends have died on me, my lovers disappeared, my whores banned, my bed rocked and heaved by earthquake - and no holy weed to get high by candlelight and dream - only fumes of buses, dust storms, and maids peeking at me thru a hole in the door secretly drilled to watch masturbators fuck pillows - I am the Gargoyle of Our Lady dreaming in space gray mist dreams -- My face is pointed towards Napoleon ------ I have no form ------ My address book is full of RIP's I have no value in the void, at home without honor, - My only friend is an old fag without a typewriter Who, if he's my friend, I'll be buggered. I have some mayonnaise left, a whole unwanted bottle of oil, peasants washing my sky light, a nut clearing his throat in the bathroom next to mine a hundred times a day sharing my common ceiling - If I get drunk I get thirsty - if I walk my foot breaks down - if I smile my mask's a farce - if I cry I'm just a child - - if I remember I'm a liar - if I write the writing's done - - if I die the dying's over - - if I live the dying's just begun - - if I wait the waiting's longer - if I go the going's gone if I sleep the bliss is heavy the bliss is heavy on my lids - if I go to cheap movies the bedbugs get me - Expensive movies I can't afford - if I do nothing nothing does

At Christmastime I had got out the little artificial fir tree from deep inside the closet and assembled and decorated it with my daughter. That tree, its tiny lights twinkling. Her, motionless before it for a long time, rapt in its multicoloured drops of light. And me, standing back, looking on. To her, it was the most beautiful of sights, countless joys shimmering invitingly in their splendour. It was a cheap tree that Fojino had bought at a local supermarket when she was a year old, saying, 'This'll do for now, won't it? It'll only get broken with her touching it. They're really quite expensive.

Subject: Thinking... “One dinner. One night. No repeats.” Do you pick a cheap or expensive restaurant? Do you pay for the dinner and the hotel room? Or do you make the woman split it with you? —Alyssa. Subject: Re: Thinking... Expensive dinner. Five star hotel suite. I pay for everything. Would you like me to book a few reservations for us so I can show you? —Thoreau. Subject: Re: Re: Thinking... Of course not. And a “few” reservations? What happened to just one? Subject: Re: Re: Re: Thinking... I told you I’d make an exception in your case. I invested in a box of paper bags today. —Thoreau

though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

In the Convention tomorrow I shall put him up to confront Saint-Just. Imagine it. Our man the picture of starched rectitude, and looking as if he has just devoured a beefsteak; and Camille making a joke or two at our man’s expense and then talking about ’89. A cheap trick, but the galleries will cheer. This will make Saint-Just lose his temper-not easy, since he cultivates this Greek statue manner of his—but I guarantee that Camille can do it. As soon as our man begins to bawl and roar, Camille will fold up and look helpless. That will get Robespierre on his feet, and we will all generate one of these huge emotional scenes. I always win those.

Remember what the fashion big mouths were saying about Jessica Simpson? Looking at her magazine pictures, sucking their teeth, going, "Oh, look at her in her 'mom jeans.'" Know what? That is an unnecessarily cheap shot at her and kinda lousy to moms at the same time. Who the hell are they to say that? What gratification does it give them to be mean at someone's expense? People made nasty comments like that about President Obama. They made an issue of his jeans when he threw out the first ball at the All-Star game in St. Louis. Why? Who was he bothering? Come on. The tabloids, celebrity mags, and TV entertainment shows do fashion critiques all the time. But it's not about fashion, it's about trashin'. Their specialty is "Celebrity Cellulite!"--running unflattering pictures of stars at the beach and saying who should give up the bikini and go for the one-piece. And this is acceptable? This is a mark of journalism in a civil society, to take ambush pictures of people at the beach? And if the camera was turned around and pointed the other way, what would that look like?

Some very elegant dishes were served up to himself and a few more of us, whilst those placed before the rest of the company consisted simply of cheap dishes and scraps. There were, in small bottles, three different kinds of wine; not that the guest might take their choice, but that they might not have any option in their power; one kind being for himself, and for us; another sort for his lesser friends (for it seems he has degrees of friends), and the third for his own freedmen and ours. My neighbour . . . asked me if I approved the arrangement. Not at all, I told him. "Pray, then," he asked, "what is your method upon such occasions?" "Mine," I returned, "is to give all my visitors the same reception; for when I give an invitation, it is to entertain, not distinguish, my company: I place every man upon my own level whom I admit to my table." . . . He replied, "This must cost you a great deal." "Not in the least." "How can that be?" "Simply because, although my freedmen don't drink the same wine as myself, yet I drink the same as they do." And, no doubt about it, if a man is wise enough to moderate his appetite, he will not find it such a very expensive thing to share with all his visitors what he takes himself. Restrain it, keep it in, if you wish to be true economist. You will find temperance a far better way of saving than treating other people rudely can be. . . . Remember, then, nothing is more to be avoided than this modern alliance of luxury with meanness; odious enough when existing separate and distinct, but still more hateful where you meet with them together.

But you didn’t even get me a six-month birthday present,” she whispered pathetically. “I didn’t get the beach party, or a cake, or any dogs.” “Honey of course I got you a birthday present,” said Pyrrha instantly. “I bought one the day of the broadcast. I went and got you a new T-shirt—the expensive kind, not the ones that dissolve when you wash them. I hid it under the sink.” Nona sucked in a breath. “Tell me about it,” she whispered. “Describe it exactly.” “Uh,” said Pyrrha, and flicked her eyes up at Paul. “Okay, so, I hadn’t cleared this with the powers that be, but it was a picture of a moustache—like the facial hair, but a cartoon?—and then there were words below it. Look, you had to see it, I’m not sure I can describe it in a way that…” “Pyrrha, I want to know what it said.” Now Pyrrha avoided Paul’s gaze. “It advertised cheap moustache rides,” said Pyrrha. “We’re talking low prices.” Nona started to cry softly, overwhelmed. Paul said, “Palamedes wouldn’t have let her wear that outside the house.” Then: “Camilla wouldn’t have let her wear it inside, either.” “Yeah, but what about you?” said Pyrrha. “Her choice,” said Paul. “I think moustache rides should be free.” “It would have been my favourite present except for the handkerchief,” said Nona breathlessly. “I’m going to go back and fetch it. I’ll remember. I’ll make myself remember. And I’ll wear it all the time, inside the house and outside the house, and then you’ll know it’s really me. I’m not going to be gone forever…I’m ready. Im ready. Let’s go.

The last time I’d been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps: The Let’s Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, ‘Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?’ The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I’d have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, ‘What have you got to be depressed about?’ The It’s All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn’t kill myself because they’d miss me so much. More often than not, I’d end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, ‘Have you any idea how many people love you?’ The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn’t care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, ‘I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?’ Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender. The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. those purveying alternative cures. And actually there were hundreds of them – urging me to do reiki, yoga, homeopathy, bible study, sufi dance, cold showers, meditation, EFT, hypnotherapy, hydrotherapy, silent retreats, sweat lodges, felting, fasting, angel channelling or eating only blue food. Everyone had a story about something that had cured their auntie/boss/boyfriend/next-door neighbour. But my sister Rachel was the worst – she had me plagued. Not a day passed that she didn’t send me a link to some swizzer. Followed by a phone call ten minutes later to make sure I’d made an appointment. (And I was so desperate that I even gave plenty of them a go.) Most likely to say, ‘This man’s a miracle worker.’ Followed by: ‘That’s why he’s so expensive. Miracles don’t come cheap.’ There was often cross-pollination between the different groupings. Sometimes the Let’s Laugh It Off merchants teamed up with the Tough Love people to tell me that recovering from depression is ‘simply mind over matter’. You just decide you’re better. (The way you would if you had emphysema.) Or an All About Me would ring a member of the Woo-Woo crew and sob and sob about how selfish I was being and the Woo-Woo crew person would agree because I had refused to cough up two grand for a sweat lodge in Wicklow. Or one of the Runaways would tiptoe back for a sneaky look at me, then commandeer a Denier into launching a two-pronged attack, telling me how well I seemed. And actually that was the worst thing anyone could have done to me, because you can only sound like a self-pitying malingerer if you protest, ‘But I don’t feel well. I feel wretched beyond description.’ Not one person who loved me understood how I’d felt. They hadn’t a clue and I didn’t blame them, because, until it had happened to me, I hadn’t a clue either.

This is the apotheosis of capitalism, the divine sanction of the free market, of unhindered profit and the most rapacious cruelties of globalization. Corporations, rapidly turning America into an oligarchy, have little interest in Christian ethics, or anybody’s ethics. They know what they have to do, as the titans of the industry remind us, for their stockholders. They are content to increase profit at the expense of those who demand fair wages, health benefits, safe working conditions and pensions. This new oligarchic class is creating a global marketplace where all workers, to compete, will have to become like workers in dictatorships such as China: denied rights, their wages dictated to them by the state, and forbidden from organizing or striking. America once attempted to pull workers abroad up to American levels, to foster the building of foreign labor unions, to challenge the abuse of workers in factories that flood the American market with cheap goods. But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom—the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is relegated to private, individual acts of charity or left to churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America’s god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized. The

Jobs and commerce have moved to edge nodes, but few people want to live in them. The presence of housing in edge nodes is often the result of spot builders filling in leftover sites with 'affordable' housing units. Nearby freeways make many of these units undesirable. Occasionally expensive apartments for households without children are added near upscale mall areas...but most affluent families prefer to live elsewhere. Ugly environments, cheap gas, and subsidized freeways mean that workers commute to residences far outside the edge nodes, scattering into less dense areas, creating one more suburban pattern, the rural fringes.

Of that first decade, Neil said I would have this recurring fantasy in which there would be a knock on the door, and I would go down, and there would be somebody wearing a suit – not an expensive suit, just the kind of suit that showed they had a job – and they would be holding a clipboard, and they'd have a paper on the clipboard, and I'd open the door and they'd say, „Hello, excuse me, I'm afraid I am here on official business. Are you Neil Gaiman?” And I would say yes. „Well, it says here that you are a writer and that you don't have to get up in the morning at any particular time, that you just write each day as much you want.” And I'd go „That's right.” "And that you enjoy writing. And it says here that all the books you want – they are just sent to you and you don't have to buy them. And films: it says here that you just go to see films. If you want to see them you just call up the person who runs the films." And I say, „Yes, that's right.” And that people like what you do and they give you money for just writing things down." And I'd say yes. And he'd say, „Well, I'm afraid we are on to you. We've caught up with you. And I'm afraid you are now going to have to go out and get a proper job.” At which point in my fantasy my heart would always sink, and I'd go, „Okay,” and I'd go and buy a cheap suit and I'd start applying to real jobs. Because once they've caught up with you, you can't argue with this: they've caught up with you. So that was the thing in my head.

My parents’ generation started out working hard, focused on earning a living without much concern about creating trouble in the environment. They weren’t out to harm the planet; they simply were not aware of what they were doing, or of how they might do it differently. In the case of the Eastern Shore beaches, the old approach left a thick mess on the places they took their families to play. After some time, they came to see that the long-term quality of the environment is a more worthy priority than the short-term need to rinse out the insides of ship hulls cheap and easy. They realized that change was possible, that change was not even all that hard or expensive, and that one small improvement could make a big difference. They saw to it that the local waters got cleaned up. They left the beach a little better than they found it.

As soon as we take our seats, a sequence of six antipasti materialize from the kitchen and swallow up the entire table: nickels of tender octopus with celery and black olives, a sweet and bitter dance of earth and sea; another plate of polpo, this time tossed with chickpeas and a sharp vinaigrette; a duo of tuna plates- the first seared and chunked and served with tomatoes and raw onion, the second whipped into a light pâté and showered with a flurry of bottarga that serves as a force multiplier for the tuna below; and finally, a plate of large sea snails, simply boiled and served with small forks for excavating the salty-sweet knuckle of meat inside. As is so often the case in Italy, we are full by the end of the opening salvo, but the night is still young, and the owner, who stops by frequently to fill my wineglass as well as his own, has a savage, unpredictable look in his eyes. Next comes the primo, a gorgeous mountain of spaghetti tossed with an ocean floor's worth of clams, the whole mixture shiny and golden from an indecent amount of olive oil used to mount the pasta at the last moment- the fat acting as a binding agent between the clams and the noodles, a glistening bridge from earth to sea. "These are real clams, expensive clams," the owner tells me, plucking one from the plate and holding it up to the light, "not those cheap, flavorless clams most restaurants use for pasta alle vongole." Just as I'm ready to wave the white napkin of surrender- stained, like my pants, a dozen shades of fat and sea- a thick cylinder of tuna loin arrives, charred black on the outside, cool and magenta through the center. "We caught this ourselves today," he whispers in my ear over the noise of the dining room, as if it were a secret to keep between the two of us. How can I refuse?

I am, reluctantly, a self-confessed carbon chauvinist. Carbon is abundant in the Cosmos. It makes marvelously complex molecules, good for life. I am also a water chauvinist. Water makes an ideal solvent system for organic chemistry to work in and stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. But sometimes I wonder. Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact that I am made chiefly of them? Are we carbon- and water-based because those materials were abundant on the Earth at the time of the origin of life? Could life elsewhere—on Mars, say—be built of different stuff? I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else? Harold Morowitz has calculated what it would cost to put together the correct molecular constituents that make up a human being by buying the molecules from chemical supply houses. The answer turns out to be about ten million dollars, which should make us all feel a little better. But even then we could not mix those chemicals together and have a human being emerge from the jar. That is far beyond our capability and will probably be so for a very long period of time. Fortunately, there are other less expensive but still highly reliable methods of making human beings. I think the lifeforms on many worlds will consist, by and large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps even many of the same basic molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids—but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmospheres will be very much like us in their atomic composition, except they might not have bones and therefore not need much calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos; hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal of damage to the kind of molecules that make us up, but other organic molecules, paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence. Liquid ammonia would make an even better solvent system, because ammonia is very abundant in the Cosmos. But it is liquid only on worlds much colder than the Earth or Mars. Ammonia is ordinarily a gas on Earth, as water is on Venus. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all—solid-state life, where there are electrical signals propagating rather than molecules floating about. But these ideas do not

I’m hot-gluing white bric-a-brac around a heart as I wonder aloud, “Should we do a special breakfast for Daddy? We could buy one of those juicers at the mall and make fresh-squeezed pink grapefruit juice. And I think I saw heart waffle makers online for not very expensive.” “Daddy doesn’t like grapefruit,” Kitty says. “And we barely use our regular waffle maker as it is. How about we just cut the waffle into the shape of a heart instead?” “That would look so cheap,” I scoff. But she’s right. There’s no sense in buying something we’d only ever use once a year, even if it only costs $19.99. As Kitty gets older, I see that she is far more like Margot than me. But then she says, “What if we use our cookie cutter to make heart-shaped pancakes instead? And put in red food coloring?” I beam at her. “Attagirl!” So maybe she’s got a little bit of me in her after all. Kitty continues. “We could put red food coloring in the syrup, too, to make it look like blood. A bloody heart!” No, never mind. Kitty is all her own.

When we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full. Yet as its price in the market falls, passion has a habit of fading away. Why, then, do we associate a cheap price with lack of value? Our response is a hangover from our long preindustrial past. For most of human history, there truly was a strong correlation between cost and value: The higher the price, the better things tended to be, because there was simply no way both for prices to be low and for quality to be high. It is not that we refuse to buy inexpensive or cheap things. It's just that getting excited over cheap things has come to seem a little bizarre. How do we reverse this? The answer lies in a slightly unexpected area: the mind of a four-year-old. Children have two advantages: They don't know what they're supposed to like and they don't understand money, so price is never a guide to value for them. We buy them a costly wooden toy made by Swedish artisans who hope to teach lessons in symmetry and find that they prefer the cardboard box that it came in. If asked to put a price on things, children tend to answer by the utility and charm of an object, not its manufacturing costs. We have been looking at prices the wrong way. We have fetishised them as tokens of intrinsic value; we have allowed them to set how much excitement we are allowed to have in given areas, how much joy is to be mined in particular places. But prices were never meant to be like this: We are breathing too much life into them and thereby dulling too many of our responses to the inexpensive world. At a certain age, something very debilitating happens to children. They start to learn about "expensive" and "cheap" and absorb the view that the more expensive something is, the better it may be. They are encouraged to think well of saving up pocket money and to see the "big" toy they are given as much better than the "cheaper" one. We can't directly go backwards; we can't forget what we know of prices. However, we can pay less attention to what things cost and more to our own responses. We need to rethink our relationship to prices. The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it.

I panted as he pulled me back through the entryway, hands on my waist, kissing the whole way, and collapsed backward onto the gray leather couch, which felt softer than my skin. I fell on top of him, straddling his lap. He kissed his way down my neck and across the collar of my blouse, leaving a trail of fire behind. "Enough of that," I panted, ripping my shirt over my head. Thank goodness I'd worn a decent bra today---blue satin with a bow in the middle, not frayed or torn anywhere. He eyed it with a growl of approval, but maybe it wasn't a growl for the bra at all, because a moment of fumbling over my back and---pop---I shook off my now unfastened bra. "And to think you didn't like me at first." He drank me in unabashedly, his eyes roaming from belly to breasts to nose to eyes, and each inch his eyes traveled made me feel more and more powerful. Like I could go anywhere, do anything. Except all I wanted to do was right here. I ground against him, feeling his cock already hard and strong under his zipper. "Who says I like you now?" He gasped and pulled me tighter onto him. "If this is what you do to people you don't like, what do you do to people you do like?" I silenced him with another kiss as I rubbed up and down him again. Now my own sex was throbbing, and I sucked in a breath with every movement. I kept moving up and down as he kissed my breasts, tongue tracing lightly over each nipple. When I couldn't take it anymore, I tumbled to the side, lying down on the couch and pulling him on top of me. Because his was an expensive couch and not the cheap one my old roommate had bought at Ikea, there was plenty of room for us to writhe without making me feel like I might topple off the edge. He went down to kiss my breasts again... and kept going. His tongue slid down my stomach, did a lazy circle around my belly button. I clenched my teeth, holding back a beg for more as he slowly, slowly, way too slowly unzipped my skirt and tugged it down. I kicked it off, along with my underwear, when he reached my knees, nearly clipping him on the ear. When I felt close to the edge, I reached down and pulled him up. My hand moved down and took over, zeroing in on just the right spot on my clit. It didn't take long. I shuddered against his shoulder, biting back a cry, then wondered why I was biting it back and let it out. Breathing hard, my head collapsed back into the cushion. I was a little worried that now post-orgasm clarity would descend upon me and be like, What the hell are you doing, Julie? but the post-orgasm clarity seemed to approve. With a wink and a nudge, it made me pull away, and the desire roared back inside me. "That's why it's great to have a clitoris," I told Bennett. "Multiple orgasms.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Understanding Metro's history may illuminate today's debates. To conservatives who decry Metro's expense--around $10 billion in nominal dollars--this book serves as a reminder that Metro was never intended to be the cheapest solution to any problem, and that it is the product of an age that did not always regard cheapness as an essential attribute of good government. To those who celebrate automobile commuting as the rational choice of free Americans, it replies that some Americans have made other choices, based on their understanding that building great cities is more important than minimizing average commuting time. This book may also answer radicals who believe that public funds should primarily--or exclusively--serve the poor, which in the context of transportation means providing bus and rail transit for the carless while leaving the middle class to drive. It suggests that Metro has done more for inner-city African Americans than is generally understood. And to those hostile to public mega-projects as a matter of principle, it responds that it may take a mega-project to kill a mega-project. Had activists merely opposed freeways, they might as well have been dismissed as cranks by politicians and technical experts alike. By championing rapid transit as an equally bold alternative, they won allies, and, ultimately, victory. Most important, this book recalls the belief of Great Society liberals that public investments should serve all classes and all races, rather than functioning as a last resort. These liberals believed, with Abraham Lincoln, that 'the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves--in their separate, and individual capacities.' This approach justifies the government's role in rail not as a means of distributing wealth, but as an agent for purchasing rapid transit--a good that people collectively want but cannot collectively buy through a market.

It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects. If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects. The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms. Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used. When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth. Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use. The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty. Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride. Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time. The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty. Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it. As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate. The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West. Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art. No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan. Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ). The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ). Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment. The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.