Dollar Dream Quotes

Good God," I said. "This is the most stereotypical vampire food ever." "Only if it was raw. What do you think?" "It's good," I said reluctantly. Who knew that bacon would have made all the difference? "Really good. I think you have a promising future as a housewife while Lissa works and makes millions of dollars." "Funny, that's exactly my dream.

His thoughts went to Kismaayo, and lately, particularly of Abdi. If there were a hero in this story, it was Abdi. Jon thought, this young man from Maine had left that war weary husk of a country called Somalia and had come to these United States of America to pursue the dream of happiness, security, and hope.

When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.

Hey, big spender,” I said. He looked appreciative but more amused than anything else. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a one dollar bill. “Hugh,” I said. “Don’t insult me.” With a sigh, he produced a five and tucked it underneath my bra strap. “Hey, Seth,” Cody suddenly said. I looked up and saw Seth standing in the doorway. A look of comic bemusement was on his face. “Hey,” he said, studying me. “So…you’re paying for dinner?

If you are a woman, if you're a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person od intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way or else you're worthless. You know when you look in the mirror and you think 'oh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I'm so ugly', don't you know, that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising, magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit. When you don't have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise, you will hesitate to call yourself an American, you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.

We may say we're looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren't we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood? - Ridley Jones

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow. The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately: I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us." And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real. Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

Yeah. Just keep the live feed going so that I can see it and pretend I’m there, too. (Tory) Yes, my queen. Anything else you’d like? (Geary) A million dollars and Brad Pitt. (Tory) You forgot world peace. (Geary) I’m feeling a bit selfish today. Teenage hormonal overdose, I think. Or just general excitement. (Tory)

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Today the game is rigged—rigged to work for those who have money and power. Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor. Meanwhile, hardworking families are told that they’ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children.

This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

If I had a dollar for everytime my mother told me god had a plan I'd probably buy a new prada bag.

For half of the world's population, roughly three billion people around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are looking less for an "electocracy" than for the basic elements that for most of us define a decent life--food, shelter, electricity, basic health care, education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power.

If you want something different out of life, you need to try something different and change the rules a bit.

I understand the arguments about how the billions of dollars spent to put men on the moon could have been used to fight poverty and hunger on Earth. But, look, I'm a scientist who sees inspiration as the ultimate tool for doing good. When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you're working at the margins. When you're putting people on the moon, you're inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved. Give yourself permission to dream.

The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we've dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.

A woman who dreams of a good home with a man who holds for her only a poor love is putting a fifty-dollar saddle on a twenty-dollar horse. She’d be far better off single than riding with him.

The water nymphs who came to Poseidon explained how little they desired to couple with the gods. Except to find out whether it was different, whether there was a fresh world, another dimension in their loins. In the old Pittsburgh, we dreamed of a city where women read Proust in the original French, and wondered whether we would cross over into a different joy if we paid a call girl a thousand dollars for a night. Or an hour. Would it be different in kind or only tricks and apparatus? I worried that a great love might make everything else an exile. It turned out that being together at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria did, indeed, measure everything after that.

It's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you.

Dear billion dollar eyes they are a paupers dream

If you are running anyway, you might as well be chasing your dreams.

May I have this damaged bunch for two cents? Speak strongly and it shall be yours for two cents. That is a saved penny that you put in the star bank...Suffer the cold for an hour. Put a shawl around you. Sai, I am cold because I am saving to buy land. That hour will save you three cents' worth of coal... When you are alone at night, do not light the lamp. Sit in the darkness and dream awhile. Reckon out how much oil you saved and put its value in pennies in the bank. The money will grow. Someday there will be fifty dollars and somewhere on this long island is a piece of land that you may buy for that money.

Ronan wasn’t exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan’s rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey’s hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was barelegged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall.

He's out there. A guy out there was meant to be the love of your life, your best friend, your soulmate. The one you can tell your dreams to. He'll brush your hair out of your eyes. Send you flowers when you least expect it. He'll stare at you during the movies, even though he paid eight dollars to see it. He'll call to say "Goodnight" or just because he is missing you. He'll look in your eyes and tell you you're the most beautiful girl in the world. And for the first time in your life, you'll believe it.

taste doesn’t cost a dime, but if you don’t have it, you can’t buy it for a million dollars,

This couldn’t be...did women really...? She must be wearing it wrong, because good God in heaven! It was horrible! Was the little string supposed to... She took it off, went to her laptop and Google searched “how to wear a thong.” No, she hadn’t put it on wrong. She tried again. Ow. Fantastic. This was just a twenty-five dollar version of a severe wedgie. She picked up her phone and called Allison. “Hey, Allison, I—” “You’ll get used to it,” Allison said

For he had learned tonight that love was not enough. There had to be a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment. There had to be a larger world than this glittering fragment of a world with all its wealth and privilege. Throughout his whole youth and early manhood, this very world of beauty, ease, and luxury, of power, glory, and security, had seemed the ultimate end of human ambition, the furthermost limit to which the aspirations of any man could reach. But tonight, in a hundred separate moment of intense reality, it had revealed to him its very core. He had seen it naked, with its guards down. He had sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind's blood and sweat and agony...Privilege and truth could not lie down together. He thought of how a silver dollar, if held close enough to the eye, could blot out the sun itself. There were stronger, deeper tides and currents running in America than any which these glamorous lives tonight had ever plumbed or even dreamed of. Those were the depths he would like to sound.

I know you sneak Adderall to study all night even though econ makes you want to kill yourself. And now I know you charge thousands of dollars to a credit card you can’t afford just to fit in.

What a fantastical place adulthood has turned out to be: with the power of social media and a thousand dollars, she's summoned Taylor's dream crush out of an ancient VHS tape and brought him here, to life.

The eternal raison d'etre of America is in its being the "sweet land of liberty". Should a land so dreamed into existence, so degenerate through material prosperity as to become what its European critics, with too much justice, have scornfully renamed it the "Land of the Dollar" - such a development will be one of the sorriest conclusions of history, and the most colossal disillusionment that has ever happened to mankind.

Black women know what it means to love ourselves in a world that hates us. We know what it means to do a whole lot with very little, to “make a dollar out of fifteen cents,” as it were. We know what it means to snatch dignity from the jaws of power and come out standing. We know what it means to face horrific violence and trauma from both our communities and our nation-state and carry on anyway. But we also scream, and cry, and hurt, and mourn, and struggle. We get heartbroken, our feelings get stepped on, our dreams get crushed. We get angry, and

She was the kind of star who sold happy dreams. She didn't want to sell darkness. Pain was best left in the real world where it belonged, where it burrowed so deep you needed a multimillion-dollar industry to escape from it.

If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it. That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.

I think about the sheer number of people who pulled together just to save my sorry ass, and I can barely comprehend it. My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they'd worked on for years just to provide a booster. The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollar. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we've dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?

A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes! He would take charge of his life anew, binding his breaking selves together. Those changes in himself that he sought, he himself would initiate and make them. No more of this miasmic, absent drift. How had he ever persuaded himself that his money-mad burg would rescue him all by itself, this Gotham in which Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman (or even Robin) to frustrate their schemes, this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot, where wealth was mistaken for riches and the joy of possession for happiness, where people lived such polished lives that the great rough truths of raw existence had been rubbed and buffed away, and in which human souls had wandered so separately for so long that they barely remembered how to touch; this city whose fabled electricity powered the electric fences that were being erected between men and men, and men and women, too? Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being Roman meant. Might this new Rome actually be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving, or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved Paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot? What, America, of the Grail? O ye Yankee Galahads, ye Hoosier Lancelots, O Parsifals of the stockyards, what of the Table Round? He felt a flood bursting in him and did not hold back. Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself. It made him want what it promised and eternally withheld. Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Uzbeks, Japanese, Lilliputians, all. America was the world's playing field, its rule book, umpire, and ball. Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town and the matter of America the only business at hand; and so, like everyone, Malik Solanka now walked its high corridors cap in hand, a supplicant at its feast; but that did not mean he could not look it in the eye. Arthur had fallen, Excalibur was lost and dark Mordred was king. Beside him on the throne of Camelot sat the queen, his sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.

Of course, angels do not exist. It is illegal to consider their existence, or even to give them a dollar when they forget bus money and start hovering around the Ralphs asking for change. The great hierarchy of angels is a foolish dream, and anyway is forbidden knowledge to Night Vale citizens. All of the angels in Night Vale live with Josie out by the car lot. There are no angels in Night Vale.

Goldman Sachs preaching about diversity so it can be at the front of the line for the next government bailout. It’s AstraZeneca waxing eloquent about climate change so it can secure multibillion-dollar government contracts for vaccine production. It’s State Street building feminist statues to detract attention from wage discrimination lawsuits from female employees, all the while marketing its exchange-traded fund with the ticker “SHE.” It’s Chamath Palihapitiya founding a social impact investment fund and criticizing Silicon Valley, even though he and his wealth are products of Silicon Valley, all to cover up for his prior tenure as an executive at Facebook who dreamed out loud about a private corporate military. Those companies and people use their market power to prop up woke causes as a way to accumulate greater political capital—only to later come back and cash in that political capital for more dollars.

There's this thing you're supposed to be part of in London. But what is it? That's the million-dollar question. Everyone's there because they're searching, aspiring. A very small percentage is actually living the dream. Ill, tired, unhappy, the rent is fucking loads, what is it you're getting? The idea of it, or something.

You’re sure you want to do this,” Galen says, eyeing me like I’ve grown a tiara of snakes on my head. “Absolutely.” I unstrap the four-hundred-dollar silver heels and spike them into the sand. When he starts unraveling his tie, I throw out my hand. “No! Leave it. Leave everything on.” Galen frowns. “Rachel would kill us both. In our sleep. She would torture us first.” “This is our prom night. Rachel would want us to enjoy ourselves.” I pull the thousand-or-so bobby pins from my hair and toss them in the sand. Really, both of us are right. She would want us to be happy. But she would also want us to stay in our designer clothes. Leaning over, I shake my head like a wet dog, dispelling the magic of hairspray. Tossing my hair back, I look at Galen. His crooked smile almost melts me where I stand. I’m just glad to see a smile on his face at all. The last six months have been rough. “Your mother will want pictures,” he tells me. “And what will she do with pictures? There aren’t exactly picture frames in the Royal Caverns.” Mom’s decision to mate with Grom and live as his queen didn’t surprise me. After all, I am eighteen years old, an adult, and can take care of myself. Besides, she’s just a swim away. “She keeps picture frames at her house though. She could still enjoy them while she and Grom come to shore to-“ “Okay, ew. Don’t say it. That’s where I draw the line.” Galen laughs and takes off his shoes. I forget all about Mom and Grom. Galen, barefoot in the sand, wearing an Armani tux. What more could a girl ask for? “Don’t look at me like that, angelfish,” he says, his voice husky. “Disappointing your grandfather is the last thing I want to do.” My stomach cartwheels. Swallowing doesn’t help. “I can’t admire you, even from afar?” I can’t quite squeeze enough innocence in there to make it believable, to make it sound like I wasn’t thinking the same thing he was. Clearing his throat, he nods. “Let’s get on with this.” He closes the distance between us, making foot-size potholes with his stride. Grabbing my hand, he pulls me to the water. At the edge of the wet sand, just out of reach of the most ambitious wave, we stop. “You’re sure?” he says again. “More than sure,” I tell him, giddiness swimming through my veins like a sneaking eel. Images of the conference center downtown spring up in my mind. Red and white balloons, streamers, a loud, cheesy DJ yelling over the starting chorus of the next song. Kids grinding against one another on the dance floor to lure the chaperones’ attention away from a punch bowl just waiting to be spiked. Dresses spilling over with skin, matching corsages, awkward gaits due to six-inch heels. The prom Chloe and I dreamed of. But the memories I wanted to make at that prom died with Chloe. There could never be any joy in that prom without her. I couldn’t walk through those doors and not feel that something was missing. A big something. No, this is where I belong now. No balloons, no loud music, no loaded punch bowl. Just the quiet and the beach and Galen. This is my new prom. And for some reason, I think Chloe would approve.

As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it when asked to define the eighties, we “borrowed a trillion dollars from the foreigners and used the money to throw a big party.

The American Dream has been defined in dollar signs and square footage.

now you’re truly alive and living the dream life, the dream life you can call your own. half a million dollars sitting around what kind of “man” are you

for every dollar spent on health care in America, ninety-five cents goes to treat a disease after it has occurred.

If I had tried to do everything I wanted to, I never would have accomplished anything big. Narrow your focus to your most important dreams and tune out everything else.

That's just how it is. You get halfway through your life and realize you've done it all wrong. You've picked the wrong jobs and followed the wrong dreams. Every decision from your cradle to the counter of an upscale children's boutique in Portland, Oregon gratingly names little fig where you now stand tethered at the age of thirty-seven for thirteen-dollars-an-hour-plus-commission has been all wrong.

The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.

Americans were endangering their mental and physical health through overwork,” and all in pursuit of the dollar. “Life is not for learning, nor is life for working,” he ranted, “but learning and working are for life.

Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence, and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life--feeding on to it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream--struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

Julia and Sallie and I all had new dresses. Do you want to hear about them? Julia's was cream satin and gold embroidery and she wore purple orchids. It was a DREAM and came from Paris, and cost a million dollars. Sallie's

Most people never pick up the phone, most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail. —Steve Jobs

Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their marks Made everything from toy guns that sparks To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much Is really sacred. While preachers preach of evil fates Teachers teach that knowledge waits Can lead to hundred-dollar plates Goodness hides behind its gates But even the President of the United States Sometimes must have To stand naked. An' though the rules of the road have been lodged It's only people's games that you got to dodge And it's alright, Ma, I can make it. Advertising signs that con you Into thinking you're the one That can do what's never been done That can win what's never been won Meantime life outside goes on All around you. Although the masters make the rules For the wise men and the fools I got nothing, Ma, to live up to. For them that must obey authority That they do not respect in any degree Who despite their jobs, their destinies Speak jealously of them that are free Cultivate their flowers to be Nothing more than something They invest in. While some on principles baptized To strict party platforms ties Social clubs in drag disguise Outsiders they can freely criticize Tell nothing except who to idolize And then say God Bless him. While one who sings with his tongue on fire Gargles in the rat race choir Bent out of shape from society's pliers Cares not to come up any higher But rather get you down in the hole That he's in. Old lady judges, watch people in pairs Limited in sex, they dare To push fake morals, insult and stare While money doesn't talk, it swears Obscenity, who really cares Propaganda, all is phony. While them that defend what they cannot see With a killer's pride, security It blows the minds most bitterly For them that think death's honesty Won't fall upon them naturally Life sometimes Must get lonely. And if my thought-dreams could been seen They'd probably put my head in a guillotine But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

What prompts alarm in me is how you and your government want to ruin not only the potential of this of this country, but also the path of those who are going to transition into more advanced beings in search of immortality and omnipotence, and maybe even participate in a great singularity. These advances are going to pass, one way or another. And your current second-rate moral system—your weak, pretend-God-will-take-care-of-us bullshit—is a waste for our species' possibilities. You people want to pretend that democracy, religious inspiration, and unbridled consumerism are going to last forever and carry us all to bliss; that the American Dream is right around the next corner for everyone. you spend hundreds of billions of dollars on lazy welfare recipients, on mentally challenged people, on uneducated repeat criminals, on obese second-rate citizens bankrupting our medical system, on murderous war machines fighting for oil and your oligarchy's pet projects in far off places. All so you maintain your puny forms of power and sleep better at night.

I stretched out on the bed and slept. It was twilight when I awakened and turned on the light. I felt better, no longer tired. I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. But suppose I failed? Suppose I had lost all of my beautiful talent? Suppose it had burned up in the fire of Biff Newhouse smashing my nose or Helen Brownell dead forever? What would happen to me? Would I go to Abe Marx and become a busboy again? I had seventeen dollars in my wallet. Seventeen dollars and the fear of writing. I sat erect before the typewriter and blew on my fingers. Please God, please Knut Hamsun, don’t desert me now. I started to write and I wrote: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— Of cabbages—and kings—” I looked at it and wet my lips. It wasn’t mine, but what the hell, a man had to start someplace.

Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut? Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes? Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

Everyone go ahead and write down your goals for the day. Please remember to be REALISTIC.” Her eyes shot to Thorne. “Winning a million dollars and hiring a harem of exotic strippers is not realistic, Thorne.” Thorne rolled his eyes and dropped his head back. “Way to kill a dream, Maroon.

God, how long is a million years to you?” God said, “A million years is like a second.” Then the man asked, “How much is a million dollars to you?” God said, “A million dollars is like a penny.” The man smiled and said, “Could you spare a penny?” God smiled back and said, “Sure, just wait a second.

May 27: Marilyn poses nude for Tom Kelley’s calendar photographs while listening to Artie Shaw. She is given a fifty-dollar flat fee for signing a contract, using the name Mona Monroe. Altogether Kelley takes shots of twenty-four poses, although only two are published, titled “A New Wrinkle” and “Golden Dreams.

Child, I am taking you to The Autumnal Ball.” “The . . . but . . . but . . . I don’t have a ticket.” “Don’t worry about it.” “But how—” “Don’t worry about it.” “But I don’t have a thousand dollars for—” “I said, don’t worry about it.” “But how can I not worry about it? Worrying is what I do! About everything!” With an unexpectedly calm smile, Coco put I finger to my lips. “And that’s why you need a fairy godmother. For the rest of the night you’re not allowed to worry about anything. You have one, and only one, responsibility. To have a dream come true and have the sweetass time of your sweetass life. Do you understand me?

Off the street. Out of the wind. Into a bar . . . like a million other bars . . . bottles of lies to ease pain . . . dollar bills traded to dose the dreams of hungry eyes . . . men transmuted from dust . . . women knitted from dead tomorrows, legs crossed, the language of their painted smiles ready to find the other side open . . .

From birth to death and further on As we were born and introduced into this world, We had a gift hard to express by word And somewhere in our continuous road, It kind of lost it sense and turned. There was that time we sure remember, When everything was now and 'till forever Children with no worries and no regrets, The only goal was making a few friends. But later on everything has changed, By minds that had it all arranged To bring the people into stress, Into creating their own mess. We have been slaved by our own mind, Turned into something out of our kind Slowly faded away from the present time, Forced to believe in lies, in fights and crime. They made it clearly a fight of the ego, A never ending war that won't just go They made it a competitive game, To seek selfish materialistic fame. They turned us one against eachother, Man against man, brother against brother Dividing us by religion and skin color, Making us fight to death over a dollar. Making us lose ourselves in sadly thoughts, Wasting our days by living in the past Depressed and haunted by the memories, And yet still hoping to fly in our dreams. Some of us tried learning how to dance, Step after step, giving our soul a new chance Some of us left our ego vanish into sounds, Thus being aware of our natural bounce. Some tried expressing in their rhymes, The voice of a generation which never dies They reached eternity through poetry Leaving the teachings that shall fulfill the prophecy Others have found their way through spirituality, Becoming conscious of the human duality Seeking the spiritual enlightenment, Of escaping an ego-oriented fighting Science, philosophy, religion, Try to explain the human origin. Maybe changes are yet to come, And it shall be better for some Death's for the spirit not an end, But a relieving of the embodiment So I believe that furthermore, We'll understand the power of our soul But leaving behind all we know, And all that we might not yet know It all resumes to that certain truth, That we all seek to once conclude.

A study published in 2004 in the leading British medical journal, The Lancet, followed thirty thousand men and women on six continents and found that changing your lifestyle could prevent at least 90 percent of all heart disease. Yet for every dollar spent on health care in America, ninety-five cents goes to treat a disease after it has occurred.

Of all the recreational activities of man, golf had to be the stupidest. The massive effort to beat nature into submission--daily moving, watering, and dousing of chemicals--so a man could pay ninety thousand dollars to push a ball into a hole. It was like they'd deliberately dreamed up the most expensive and ecologically damaging way to enjoy a day in the sun.

The impact of a dollar upon the heart" The impact of a dollar upon the heart Smiles warm red light Sweeping from the hearth rosily upon the white table, With the hanging cool velvet shadows Moving softly upon the door. The impact of a million dollars Is a crash of flunkeys And yawning emblems of Persia Cheeked against oak, France and a sabre, The outcry of old beauty Whored by pimping merchants To submission before wine and chatter. Silly rich peasants stamp the carpets of men, Dead men who dreamed fragrance and light Into their woof, their lives; The rug of an honest bear Under the feet of a cryptic slave Who speaks always of baubles, Forgetting state, multitude, work, and state, Champing and mouthing of hats, Making ratful squeak of hats, Hats.

His wife, Electra, was a capable helpmeet, although—like himself— a dreamer of dreams and a private dabbler in romance. The first thing she did, after her marriage—child as she was, aged only nineteen— was to buy an acre of ground on the edge of the town, and pay down the cash for it—twenty-five dollars, all her fortune. Saladin had less, by fifteen. She instituted a vegetable garden there, got it farmed on shares by the nearest neighbor, and made it pay her a hundred per cent. a year. Out of Saladin's first year's wage she put thirty dollars in the savings-bank, sixty out of his second, a hundred out of his third, a hundred and fifty out of his fourth. His wage went to eight hundred a year, then, and meantime two children had arrived and increased the expenses, but she banked two hundred a year from the salary, nevertheless, thenceforth. When she had been married seven years she built and furnished a pretty and comfortable two-thousand-dollar house in the midst of her garden-acre, paid half of the money down and moved her family in. Seven years later she was out of debt and had several hundred dollars out earning its living.

The only time I get to be alone is while traveling." "Except this week," Charlie said. He turned his head and she saw herself reflected in his shades. "True. And you're not at all what I expected." Not that Connor had had any idea what to expect. But he would've preferred if she hadn't been the beautiful blonde who wore skimpy red bikini tops and starred in his dreams last night.

She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir to a history of disappointment and betrayal, violence and loss. Centuries of loss, empires of disappointment. All the anger that Gwen had been feeling, not just today or over the past nine months but all her life—feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream—struck her for the first time as a liability. As purely tragic. There was no way to partake of it without handing it on down the generations.

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!

My friend Joe Polish uses the analogy of a racehorse. If you owned a million-dollar racehorse, you would take great care in how you treated that horse. You would feed it well, make sure it was well rested, carefully monitor its workouts, give it a clean and comfortable stable, and schedule regular checkups with a vet. In your life and your business, your body is your million-dollar racehorse. Don’t you deserve the same care?

He longed for a heart like the one his friend was getting, an unstoppable pump that would not falter. Danny might appear to be in trouble, but he never really is, he has this secret strength. Now, though he's lost fifty thousand dollars in a golf-course scheme and his ex-wife is suing him and he lives without furniture, these are minor details. The man is complete. Self-destructive to some extent, but whole enough to take it.

Every Sunday we gather in a multimillion-dollar building with millions of dollars in vehicles parked outside. We leave worship to spend thousands of dollars on lunch before returning to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of homes. We live in luxury. Meanwhile the poor man is outside our gate. And he is hungry. In the time we gather for worship on a Sunday morning almost a thousand children elsewhere die because they have no food. If it were our kids starving, they would all be gone by the time we said our closing prayer. We certainly wouldn't ignore our kids while we sang songs and entertained ourselves, but we are content with ignoring other parents' kids. Many of them are our spiritual brothers and sisters in developing nations. They are suffering from malnutrition, deformed bodies and brains, and preventable diseases. At most, we are throwing our scraps to them while we indulge in our pleasures here.

The universe gives what the universe gives, yes. Cheap thrills, plenty of those, enough to get you through until Halloween when the Catholic school girls come out in full force and wink as they ask you to spank them (they’ve been very naughty). I’m going to sleep now and dream of deeper waters with treasure at the bottom. This junk has rendered me catatonic. I’m a mermaid, goddamn it, not the tooth fairy existing solely to place silver dollars beneath your crybaby pillow.

The story Lucas labored over for years was in many senses a product of its time and the eras that had preceded it, but the dream he captured on celluloid turned out to be utterly malleable and exportable. Star Wars might just have the power to make Diné cool again. But isn’t this just a form of American cultural imperialism, in which Native people are surrendering to the forces of Hollywood? Wheeler has two words for that notion: “C’mon, dude.” Star Wars is not Hollywood.

Those beautiful girls, so happy when you acted like a gentleman and all of that, just to touch them and carry the memory of it back to my room, where dust gathered upon my typewriter and Pedro the mouse sat in his hole, his black eyes watching me through that time of dream and reverie. Pedro the mouse, a good mouse but never domesticated, refusing to be petted or house-broken. I saw him the first time I walked into my room, and that was during my heyday, when The Little Dog Laughed was in the current August issue. It was five months ago, the day I got to town by bus from Colorado with a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket and big plans in my head. I had a philosophy in those days. I was a lover of man and beast alike, and Pedro was no exception; but cheese got expensive, Pedro called all his friends, the room swarmed with them, and I had to quit it and feed them bread. They didn't like bread. I had spoiled them and they went elsewhere, all but Pedro the ascetic who was content to eat the pages of an old Gideon Bible.

You don’t represent the working men,” Haywood charged. “I do,” the congressman replied in a huff. “You are an employer, are you not?” “Yes.” “Then you do not represent the working people. You represent the employers. There is nothing in common between the two classes so you - couldn’t possibly represent them both.” Despite Haywood’s belligerence, the congressman warmed to the verbal jousting. Laughing at the charge that he had never done an honest day’s work, Ames said he worked longer hours than anyone Haywood knew. This caused Big Bill to snap to attention. “Do you think six dollars too little pay for a man to work a week for?” Haywood demanded. “Don’t you think $7,500 a year too much to pay a man for making laws when only six dollars a week is paid a man for making cloth? Don’t you believe that it is more essential to mankind to make cloth than it is to make laws?” The congressman replied that his federal salary was not his chief income and that he gave it, and more, to charity. Haywood said charity would not be needed if workers were given living wages.

This movement to which he had dedicated his life could not be snuffed out by a few opportunists, a sackful of dollars and a cunt in the Kremlin. It was as old and as strong as the human spirit itself. It would come back, with fresh vigour, soon, very soon. It might have a different name, a different banner. But men and women would always want to walk that path, that tricky uphill path across the river of stones and through the damp cloud, because they knew that at the end they would burst into the bright sunshine and see the mountain top clear above them. Men and women dreamed of that moment. They would link arms again. They would have a new song – no longer ‘Stepping the Red Pathway’ as it had been on Rykosha Mountain. But they would sing this new song to the old tune. And they would gather themselves to make that mighty second jump. Then the ground would shake and all the capitalists and imperialists and plant-loving Fascists and filth and scum and renegades and fucking intellectuals and boy prosecutors and Judases with birdshit on their skulls would shit themselves one final, mighty time.

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Computers were built in the late 1940s because mathematicians like John von Neumann thought that if you had a computer—a machine to handle a lot of variables simultaneously—you would be able to predict the weather. Weather would finally fall to human understanding. And men believed that dream for the next forty years. They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That’s been a cherished scientific belief since Newton.” “And?” “Chaos theory throws it right out the window. It says that you can never predict certain phenomena at all. You can never predict the weather more than a few days away. All the money that has been spent on long-range forecasting—about half a billion dollars in the last few decades—is money wasted. It’s a fool’s errand. It’s as pointless as trying to turn lead into gold. We look back at the alchemists and laugh at what they were trying to do, but future generations will laugh at us the same way. We’ve tried the impossible—and spent a lot of money doing it. Because in fact there are great categories of phenomena that are inherently unpredictable.

Depends,” I answered. “Are you here to tell me Ginger owes you three million dollars now?” “Nope.” “Are you here about Ginger at all?” “Nope.” “Are you here to freak me out in any other way?” “Nope.” “This would include asking me for a date,” I warned. “Babe, don’t date,” he replied. This was a surprise so I tipped my head to the side. “You don’t?” “Do tequila shots followed by five hours of sex count as a date?” he asked. “Um… no,” I answered. “Then I don’t date.” I smiled at him. Then, stupidly, I asked, “You can have sex for five hours?” He smiled at me. Yikes. Moving on.

There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday.

Poor is relative, of course. None of you were rich or had any dreams of being rich or even knew anyone rich. But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. Crossing that gap can happen in a hundred ways, almost all by accident. Bad day at work and/or kid has a fever and/or miss the bus and consequently ten minutes late to the audition which equals you don’t get to play the part of Background Oriental with Downtrodden Face. Which equals, stretch the dollar that week, boil chicken bones twice for a watery soup, make the bottom of the bag of rice last another dinner or three.

I understand the arguments about how the billions of dollars spent to put men on the moon could have been used to fight poverty and hunger on Earth. But, look, I'm a scientist who sees inspiration as the ultimate tool for doing good. When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you're working at the margins. When you're putting people on the moon, you're inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved. Give yourself permission to dream. Fuel your kids' dreams, too. Once in a while, that might even mean letting them stay up past their bedtimes.

When you’re a professional athlete, you get paid millions of dollars for doing something that’s not only fun, but also physical and badass. You have fans: pathetic people without their own lives or hopes or dreams that measure their happiness on your weekly performance (this still boggles my mind, but in the best way possible—however, my role as a fan now is quite detached). You get to travel around to different cities and fuck their most beautiful women. You are given license to do pretty much whatever you want all the time, and are forgiven easily and often instantly when caught doing anything illegal. Professional athletes can literally get away with murder.

Dollar for dollar, no other society approaches the United States in terms of the number of square feet per person, the number of baths per bedroom, the number of appliances in the kitchen, the quality of the climate control, and the convenience of the garage. The American private realm is simply a superior product. The problem is that most suburban residents, the minute the leave this refuge, are confronted by a tawdry and stressful environment. They enter their cars and embark on a journey of banality and hostility that lasts until they arrive that interior of their next destination. Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal.

That American dream had given me confidence to my voice, determination to my actions, precision to my desires, speed to my gait and strength to my gaze. That American dream made me believe I could have everything, that I could go around in a chauffeur-driven car while estimating the weight of the squash being carried on a rusty bicycle by a woman with eyes blurred by sweat; that I could dance to the same rhythm as the girls who swayed their hips at the bar to dazzle men whose thick billfolds were swollen with American dollars; that I could live in the grand villa of an expatriate and accompany barefoot children to their school that sat right on the sidewalk where two streets intersected.

When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The

So Germany can’t pay France and Britain and France and Britain can’t pay America because the Gold Standard says money = gold and America already has all the gold. But America won’t forgive the loans so Germany starts printing dumpsters full of money just to keep up appearances until one U.S. dollar is worth six hundred and thirty BILLION marks. There’s so much cash, kids are building money forts it is tragic/pimp as hell. Britain does convince America to go easy and lower the interest rates on the loans but in order to do that America has to lower ALL THE INTEREST RATES so everybody back in the U.S. is like “SWEET FREE MONEY BETTER USE IT TO BUY STOCKS” and they just go nuts the whole stock market goes completely bonkers shoe-shine boys are giving out hot tips hobos have stock portfolios and the dudes in charge are TERRIFIED because they know that at this point the market is just running on bullshit and dreams and real soon it’s gonna get to that part in the dream where you’re naked at your tuba recital and you never learned to play the tuba. There are other people who are like “NAW THE MARKET WILL BE GREAT FOREVER PUT ALL YOUR MONEY IN IT” but you know what those people are? WRONG. WRONG LIKE A DOG EATING MAYONNAISE. The market goes down like a clown and a bunch of people lose a bunch of money. It happens on a Tuesday and everybody calls it Black Tuesday and then it happens again on Black Thursday also Black Monday. Everyone is so poor they have even pawned their creativity.

Everyone was in a festive mood, eating and drinking to the sounds of a slack-key guitar, when a white man abruptly announced to the bartender, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that he shouldn’t have to drink good liquor “next to a nigger.” The room fell quiet and people turned to my father, expecting a fight. Instead, my father stood up, walked over to the man, smiled, and proceeded to lecture him about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man. “This fella felt so bad when Barack was finished,” Gramps would say, “that he reached into his pocket and gave Barack a hundred dollars on the spot. Paid for all our drinks and puu-puus for the rest of the night—and your dad’s rent for the rest of the month.

The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.

My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they’d worked on for years just to provide a booster. The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.

A young man dreamed of being an actor, but in the early 1980s, he wasn’t getting the big parts he wanted. Broke and discouraged, he drove his beat-up old car to the top of a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles and did something unusual. He wrote himself a check for ten million dollars for “Acting services rendered.” This young man had grown up so poor his family lived in a Volkswagen van at one time. He put that check in his wallet and kept it there. When things got tough, he’d pull it out and look at it to remind himself of his dream. A dozen years later, that same young man, the comedian Jim Carrey, was making fifteen million to twenty-five million a movie. Studies tell us that we move toward what we consistently see. You should keep something in front of you, even if it’s symbolic, to remind you of what you are believing for.

I always seek to provide value in the entertainment that I create, but in addition to that, tithing makes every dollar I earn valuable no matter what, because 10 percent of every dollar is going to someone in need. When the Bible speaks of giving back, it tells the story of farmers who, when harvesting from their orchards, always leave something on the vine for those who have nothing. If you have ten apples, you pick nine and leave one. That's what I do. Ten percent of every dollar I make goes to pay for a shelter to help a woman like my mom escape a man like my dad. Ten percent of every dollar I make goes to helping a kid like my childhood friend Chris stay off the streets. Ten percent of every dollar I make goes to helping students get the kind of scholarship that would have allowed me to follow my dream of going to art school. Because I tithe, everything I do has value.

My family is a classic American-dream story. My great-grandparents fled Russia to avoid being murdered for their religion. Just two generations later, my parents fled New York City weekends for their country house. I never felt guilty about this. I was raised to believe America rewards hard work. But I was also raised to understand that luck plays a role in even the bootstrappiest success story. The cost of living the dream, I was taught, is the responsibility to expand it for others. It’s a more than fair price. Yet the people running the country didn’t see it that way. With George W. Bush in the White House, millionaires and billionaires were showered with tax cuts. Meanwhile, schools went underfunded. Roads and bridges deteriorated. Household incomes languished. Deficits ballooned. And America went to war. President Bush invaded Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, a campaign which hit a snag when it turned out those weapons didn’t exist. But by then it was too late. We had broken a country and owned the resulting mess. Colin Powell called this “the Pottery Barn rule,” which, admittedly, was cute. Still, it’s hard to imagine a visit to Pottery Barn that costs trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives. Our leaders, in other words, had made bad choices. They would therefore be replaced with better ones. That’s how AP Government told me the system worked. In the real world, however, the invasion of Iraq became an excuse for a dark and antidemocratic turn. Those who questioned the war, the torture of prisoners—or even just the tax cuts—found themselves accused of something barely short of treason. No longer was a distinction made between supporting the president’s policies and America’s troops. As an electoral strategy, this was dangerous and cynical. Also, it worked. So no, I didn’t grow up with a high opinion of politicians. But I did grow up in the kind of environment where people constantly told me I could change the world. In 2004, eager to prove them right, I volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Why can't we sit together? What's the point of seat reservations,anyway? The bored woman calls my section next,and I think terrible thoughts about her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I'm reaching for my book again-it's going to be a long flight-when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me. "Pardon me,but I wonder if you wouldn't mind switching seats.You see,that's my girlfriend there,and she's pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes,I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when...well..." St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around. The paper crinkles dramatically. The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend? "Thank you.I was in forty-five G." He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy onhis other side stares at us in horror,but St. Clair doesn't care. "They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts. There's no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together." "That's flattering,thanks." But I laugh,and he looks pleased-until takeoff, when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingy similar to key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we're above the clouds. Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight. We don't talk about what waits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph.Instead,we browse Skymall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world's largest crossword puzzle. "At least they're practical," he says. "What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh,I'm sorry Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across, Norwegian Birdcall." "At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding "unsightly utility posts.' You realize you have no lawn?" "I could hide other stuff.Like...failed French tests.Or illegal moonshining equipment." He doubles over with that wonderful boyish laughter, and I grin. "But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?" "Use it in the bathtub." He wipes a tear from his cheek. "Ooo,look! A Mount Rushmore garden statue. Just what you need,Anna.And only forty dollars! A bargain!" We get stumped on the page of golfing accessories, so we switch to drawing rude pictures of the other people on the plane,followed by rude pictures of Euro Disney Guy. St. Clair's eyes glint as he sketches the man falling down the Pantheon's spiral staircase. There's a lot of blood. And Mickey Mouse ears. After a few hours,he grows sleepy.His head sinks against my shoulder. I don't dare move.The sun is coming up,and the sky is pink and orange and makes me think of sherbet.I siff his hair. Not out of weirdness.It's just...there. He must have woken earlier than I thought,because it smells shower-fresh. Clean. Healthy.Mmm.I doze in and out of a peaceful dream,and the next thing I know,the captain's voice is crackling over the airplane.We're here. I'm home.

The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we've dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh? Anyway, my ribs hurt like hell, my vision is still blurry from acceleration sickness, I'm really hungry, it'll be another 211 days before I'm back on Earth, and, apparently, I smell like a skunk took a shit on some sweat socks. This is the happiest day of my life.

Zoey picked up her spoon and tasted it, and she was immediately and startlingly transported to a perfect autumn childhood day, the kind of day when sunlight is short but it's still warm enough to play outside. For the second course, the chilled crab cake was only the size of a silver dollar and the mustard cream and the green endive were just splashes of color on the plate. The visual experience was like dreaming of faraway summer while staring at Christmas lights through a frosty window. The third course brought to mind the first hot day of spring, when it's too warm to eat in the house so you sit outside with a dinner plate of Easter ham and corn on your lap and a bottle of Coca-Cola sweating beside you. Zoey could feel the excitement of summer coming, and she couldn't wait for it. And then summer arrived with the final course. And, like summer always is, it was worth the wait. The tiny container looked like a miniature milk glass, and the whipped milk in it reminded her of cold, sweet soft-serve ice cream on a day when the pavement burns through flip-flops and even shade trees are too hot to sit under. The savory bits of crispy cornbread mixed in gave the dessert a satisfying campfire crunch.

The overall U.S. homeownership rate increased from 64 percent in 1994 to a peak in 2004 with an all-time high of 69.2 percent. Real estate had become the leading business in America, more and more speculators invested money in the business. During 2006, 22 percent of homes purchased (1.65 million units) were for investment purposes, with an additional 14 percent (1.07 million units) purchased as vacation homes. These figures led Americans to believe that their economy was indeed booming. And when an economy is booming nobody is really interested in foreign affairs, certainly not in a million dead Iraqis. But then the grave reality dawned on the many struggling, working class Americans and immigrants, who were failing to pay back money they didn't have in the first place. Due to the rise in oil prices and the rise of interest rates, millions of disadvantaged Americans fell behind. By the time they drove back to their newly purchased suburban dream houses, there was not enough money in the kitty to pay the mortgage or elementary needs. Consequently, within a very short time, millions of houses were repossessed. Clearly, there was no one around who could afford to buy those newly repossessed houses. Consequently, the poor people of America became poorer than ever. Just as Wolfowitz's toppled Saddam, who dragged the American Empire down with him, the poor Americans, that were set to facilitate Wolfowitz's war, pulled down American capitalism as well as the American monetary and banking system. Greenspan's policy led an entire class to ruin, leaving America's financial system with a hole that now stands at a trillion dollars.

Economics today creates appetites instead of solutions. The western world swells with obesity while others starve. The rich wander about like gods in their own nightmares. Or go skiing in the desert. You don’t even have to be particularly rich to do that. Those who once were starving now have access to chips, Coca-Cola, trans fats and refined sugars, but they are still disenfranchized. It is said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about western civilization, he answered that yes, it would be a good idea. The bank man’s bonuses and the oligarch’s billions are natural phenomena. Someone has to pull away from the masses – or else we’ll all become poorer. After the crash Icelandic banks lost 100 billion dollars. The country’s GDP had only ever amounted to thirteen billion dollars in total. An island with chronic inflation, a small currency and no natural resources to speak of: fish and warm water. Its economy was a third of Luxembourg’s. Well, they should be grateful they were allowed to take part in the financial party. Just like ugly girls should be grateful. Enjoy, swallow and don’t complain when it’s over. Economists can pull the same explanations from their hats every time. Dream worlds of total social exclusion and endless consumerism grow where they can be left in peace, at a safe distance from the poverty and environmental destruction they spread around themselves. Alternative universes for privileged human life forms. The stock market rises and the stock market falls. Countries devalue and currencies ripple. The market’s movements are monitored minute by minute. Some people always walk in threadbare shoes. And you arrange your preferences to avoid meeting them. It’s no longer possible to see further into the future than one desire at a time. History has ended and individual freedom has taken over. There is no alternative.

In the very midst of this panic came the news that the steamer Central America, formerly the George Law, with six hundred passengers and about sixteen hundred thousand dollars of treasure, coming from Aspinwall, had foundered at sea, off the coast of Georgia, and that about sixty of the passengers had been providentially picked up by a Swedish bark, and brought into Savannah. The absolute loss of this treasure went to swell the confusion and panic of the day. A few days after, I was standing in the vestibule of the Metropolitan Hotel, and heard the captain of the Swedish bark tell his singular story of the rescue of these passengers. He was a short, sailor-like-looking man, with a strong German or Swedish accent. He said that he was sailing from some port in Honduras for Sweden, running down the Gulf Stream off Savannah. The weather had been heavy for some days, and, about nightfall, as he paced his deck, he observed a man-of-war hawk circle about his vessel, gradually lowering, until the bird was as it were aiming at him. He jerked out a belaying pin, struck at the bird, missed it, when the hawk again rose high in the air, and a second time began to descend, contract his circle, and make at him again. The second time he hit the bird, and struck it to the deck. . . . This strange fact made him uneasy, and he thought it betokened danger; he went to the binnacle, saw the course he was steering, and without any particular reason he ordered the steersman to alter the course one point to the east. After this it became quite dark, and he continued to promenade the deck, and had settled into a drowsy state, when as in a dream he thought he heard voices all round his ship. Waking up, he ran to the side of the ship, saw something struggling in the water, and heard clearly cries for help. Instantly heaving his ship to, and lowering all his boats, he managed to pick up sixty or more persons who were floating about on skylights, doors, spare, and whatever fragments remained of the Central America. Had he not changed the course of his vessel by reason of the mysterious conduct of that man-of-war hawk, not a soul would probably have survived the night.