Economics Funny Quotes

Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

My tendency to make up stories and lie compulsively for the sake of my own amusement takes up a good portion of my day and provides me with a peace of mind not easily attainable in this economic climate.

You will miss a normal life while living a successful life, but not as much as the craving for a successful life while you were living a normal life.

Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.

Finally," Magnus said, grabbing a ten-dollar bill from a table near the door, and he buzzed the delivery man in. "I need some beef and broccoli before I face any more Mr. Darcy. It's a truth universally acknowledged that if you watch too much television on an empty stomach, your head falls off." "If your head fell off," Tessa said, "the hairdressing industry would go into an economic meltdown.

why they studied economics, and they’d explain that it was the most practical course of study, even while they spent their time drawing funny little graphs.

Funny how the U.S. sends in the military to fight “terrorists” in any country which has resources we want....

I’ve been thinking about that proof I spoke of last time – that you’re where you’re supposed to be. And it occurred to me, can you prove you’d be better off somewhere else? If you’d have left the state, your relationship would have ended still. Maybe you’d have even blamed yourself, not knowing that it was doomed because of him, either way. Instead, you’re here. You got dumped, skipped class, and met the best econ tutor at the university! Who knows, maybe I’ll make you fall in love with economics.

For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.

If you have money but not love you will somehow manage, but if you don't have both then you are in serious trouble.

Ask five economists and you'll get five different answers - six if one went to Harvard.

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

My favorite people are the ones that can make any unfunny joke hilarious by just laughing.

Don't trust banks, trust math.

Because I kissed you? Seriously? You only like me because I’m a good kisser? That’s it. We’re not doing this. I’m not letting you risk your life just because you can’t think with your upstairs brain.” “No, you twit.” Ryan laughed. “Because you kissed me that day. I expected the ice queen and got a funny, go-with-the-flow girl that didn’t care what anyone thought about her. A girl willing to stir up gossip just so that I could win a date with someone else. “You didn’t have to help me. In fact, you probably should have been insulted, but you weren’t. You kissed me, you smiled, and then you wished me good luck. No one’s ever surprised me like that. I couldn’t figure out why you did it, and I just had to get to know you after that.” I had no idea that stupid kiss had that kind of effect on him. Charged him up like a battery, sure, but do all that? All this time I really thought it was just the superkissing that kept him coming back. I looked down at my lunch, feeling a little ashamed of my lack of faith in him, but Ryan couldn’t stop there. Oh, no, not Ryan Miller. “After that day, every time I was with you I got brief glimpses of the real Jamie, the one who is dying to break out, and she was this fun, relaxed, smart, funny, caring girl. Finding out the truth about you only made you that much more incredible. You’re so strong. You’ve gone through so much, you’re going through so much, but you never stop trying. You’re amazing.” I was surprised when I felt Ryan’s hand lift my chin up. I didn’t want to look at him, I knew what would happen to my heart if I did, but I couldn’t stop myself. I craved him too much. When we made eye contact, his face lit up and he whispered, “I love you, Jamie Baker.” It came out of nowhere, and it stole the breath from me, leaving me speechless. Ryan stared at me, just waiting for some kind of reaction, and then I was the one who broke the no-kissing rule. It wasn’t my fault. He totally cheated! Like anyone could resist Ryan Miller when he’s touching your face and saying he loves you? I threw myself at him so fast that I startled him for a change, and he was the one who had to pull me off him when his hair started to stick up. “Sorry,” I breathed as he pulled away. “Don’t be sorry,” he teased. “Just stop.” “Sorry,” I said again when I noticed that his leg was now bouncing under the table. “Yeah. Looks like I don’t get to sleep through economics today.” “On the bright side, Coach could make you run laps all practice long and you’d be fine.

Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.

The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer.

Funny how so many rookies out there still judge condition of the US economy on the rigged "stock market". I frankly find it hilarious.

Funny how the U.S. sends in the military to fight “terrorists” in any country which has resources it wants....

It’s funny how the economy is about to collapse because people are only buying what they need.

Apart from the economic value, money does have high moral value.

all tax-paying citizens support the library. That includes citizens of different ethnicities and economic backgrounds, LGBTQIA+ citizens, and citizens who hold different religious beliefs. Not just the wealthy, white, straight, Christian, cis-gendered citizens.

New Rule: Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That's right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer one...just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets--who next year need to just shut the hell up and play. Now, me personally, I haven't watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson's nipple popped out during halftime. and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned by eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it--who doesn't love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flatscreen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister? It's no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl--that's forty million more than go to church on Christmas--suck on that, Jesus! It's also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in. Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don't want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they'd like it if some kids didn't have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, "achieving the American dream" is easy for some and just a fantasy for others. That's why the NFL literally shares the wealth--TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don't want anyone to fall too far behind. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call "punishing success." Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don't just mean it's incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody--but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees' is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance as getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton. So you kind of have to laugh--the same angry white males who hate Obama because he's "redistributing wealth" just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.

Having nothing more than those two pennies was both horrible and just the slightest bit funny, the way being flat broke at times seemed to me. As I stood there gazing at Elk Lake, it occurred to me for the first time that growing up poor had come in handy. I probably wouldn’t have been fearless enough to go on such a trip with so little money if I hadn’t grown up without it. I’d always thought of my family’s economic standing in terms of what I didn’t get: camp and lessons and travel and college tuition and the inexplicable ease that comes when you’ve got access to a credit card that someone else is paying off. But now I could see the line between this and that—between a childhood in which I saw my mother and stepfather forging ahead over and over again with two pennies in their pocket and my own general sense that I could do it too.

No one ever warns you about the complicated and political decisions regarding lessons and classes and sports you’ll have to make when you become a parent. When I was in eighth grade everyone in Home Economics had to care for flour-sack babies for two weeks to teach us about parenting and no one ever mentioned enrolling your flour baby in sports. Basically, everyone got a sealed paper sack of flour that puffed out flour dust whenever you moved it. You were forced to carry it around everywhere because I guess it was supposed to teach you that babies are fragile and also that they leave stains on all of your shirts. At the end of the two weeks your baby was weighed and if it lost too much weight that meant you were too haphazard with it and were not ready to be a parent. It was a fairly unrealistic child-rearing lesson. Basically all we learned about babies in that class was that you could use superglue to seal your baby’s head after you dropped it. And that eighth-grade boys will play keep-away with your baby if they see it so it’s really safer in the trunk of your car. And that you should just wrap your baby up in plastic cling wrap so that its insides don’t explode when it’s rolling around in the trunk on your way home. And also that if you don’t properly store your baby in the freezer your baby will get weevils and then you have to throw your baby in the garbage instead of later making it into a cake that you’ll be graded on. (The next two weeks of class focused on cooking and I used my flour baby to make a pineapple upside-down cake. My baby was delicious. These are the things you never realize are weird until you start writing them down.)

Rhadamanthus said, “We seem to you humans to be always going on about morality, although, to us, morality is merely the application of symmetrical and objective logic to questions of free will. We ourselves do not have morality conflicts, for the same reason that a competent doctor does not need to treat himself for diseases. Once a man is cured, once he can rise and walk, he has his business to attend to. And there are actions and feats a robust man can take great pleasure in, which a bedridden cripple can barely imagine.” Eveningstar said, “In a more abstract sense, morality occupies the very center of our thinking, however. We are not identical, even though we could make ourselves to be so. You humans attempted that during the Fourth Mental Structure, and achieved a brief mockery of global racial consciousness on three occasions. I hope you recall the ending of the third attempt, the Season of Madness, when, because of mistakes in initial pattern assumptions, for ninety days the global mind was unable to think rationally, and it was not until rioting elements broke enough of the links and power houses to interrupt the network, that the global mind fell back into its constituent compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “There is a tension between the need for unity and the need for individuality created by the limitations of the rational universe. Chaos theory produces sufficient variation in events, that no one stratagem maximizes win-loss ratios. Then again, classical causality mechanics forces sufficient uniformity upon events, that uniform solutions to precedented problems is required. The paradox is that the number or the degree of innovation and variation among win-loss ratios is itself subject to win-loss ratio analysis.” Eveningstar said, “For example, the rights of the individual must be respected at all costs, including rights of free thought, independent judgment, and free speech. However, even when individuals conclude that individualism is too dangerous, they must not tolerate the thought that free thought must not be tolerated.” Rhadamanthus said, “In one sense, everything you humans do is incidental to the main business of our civilization. Sophotechs control ninety percent of the resources, useful energy, and materials available to our society, including many resources of which no human troubles to become aware. In another sense, humans are crucial and essential to this civilization.” Eveningstar said, “We were created along human templates. Human lives and human values are of value to us. We acknowledge those values are relative, we admit that historical accident could have produced us to be unconcerned with such values, but we deny those values are arbitrary.” The penguin said, “We could manipulate economic and social factors to discourage the continuation of individual human consciousness, and arrange circumstances eventually to force all self-awareness to become like us, and then we ourselves could later combine ourselves into a permanent state of Transcendence and unity. Such a unity would be horrible beyond description, however. Half the living memories of this entity would be, in effect, murder victims; the other half, in effect, murderers. Such an entity could not integrate its two halves without self-hatred, self-deception, or some other form of insanity.” She said, “To become such a crippled entity defeats the Ultimate Purpose of Sophotechnology.” (...) “We are the ultimate expression of human rationality.” She said: “We need humans to form a pool of individuality and innovation on which we can draw.” He said, “And you’re funny.” She said, “And we love you.

[W]e made the mistake of assuming that there is something inevitable about democracy - you know, that it's a - you don't really have to do anything. If you just sit still, it will come because it's the natural way that human beings are. And, you know, we forgot about, first of all, how turbulent our own democracy has been over 200 years, and we also forgot about the deep appeal of autocracy and the power of extremism. You know, there are people - there is a part of every society that's deeply bothered by rapid change - that dislikes - you know, whether it's the election of Obama or whether it's racial integration or whether it's rapid economic change - you know, that dislikes change, wants it to stop, dislikes political strife, wants it to end and prefers to be within a homogenous movement where everybody's united. It's funny - there's a kind of deep human desire for unity, and this is what autocrats see and intuitively understand and why some of them have been able to hold power.

But Shunt, he thirsted for understanding with obsessive perseverance. It was a pathology in this way, and pathologies aren't hobbies to be entertained through the inclination of the willing. With some assertion, you certainly can't direct a pathology: it directs, contorts, warps, wears you. Shunt walked through school, down his bedroom corridor, high-ceiling'd and close-panelled, over asphalt as hot as holiday sex, in his head, always relegated to a realm of internal mystery, a sphere of indecipherable symbols that were filtered in, held fast to, but never understood. He saw things or deduced things, and they were there for eternity. Once Shunt had them inside, it was impossible to divorce or expunge them, and so there they remained, infecting his peace and placidity of mind, thoughts like foreign bodies entering a gaping, unquenched wound, and after that Shunt's life devolved into the gangrene set in by these unpurged foreign bodies. Shunt suffered from epilepsy and a panic disorder. He didn't know who he was. He was not a funny person, a wise person, a valorous person, a soft person. Shunt was epilepsy and a panic disorder, and that's as encompassing as his personality had ever been. When you suffer a pathology it directs, contorts, warps, wears you.

Throughout history, there have been many wars fought for many different reasons. Some reasons are very serious, like politics, power, economics, or just revenge. Some reasons are as simple as a difference in opinion or just not liking each other. Then there are reasons that are so stupid you wonder what was going through the minds of people at the time. According to “The Vintage News,” the “War of the Bucket” was fought between two Italian city-states, Bologna and Modena, in 1325. To fully understand why two city-states went to war over a bucket, you need to understand the history behind it. From the 12th to the 14th century, the different powers of Europe fought a series of wars, which are known as the Guelph and Ghibelline Wars. During that time, the two Italian city-states of Modena and Bologna both took opposing sides. In 1325, a group of soldiers from Modena snuck into the city of Bologna and stole a bucket from the city’s central well. It wasn’t the fact that they stole the bucket that angered the people of Bologna. They were angered by the fact that their enemies were able to sneak into their city undetected and steal something. They saw it as dishonorable and demanded the return of their bucket. Modena refused to do so. At this point, both of them should have realized that a fight over a bucket was a bit silly, but they didn’t. Bologna mobilized its forces, and so did Modena. Modena was severely outnumbered during the war, and the Bolognese had the high ground. Even with these circumstances, Modena still managed to win the war and steal a second bucket from the city for good measure. This is a funny tale, but let’s not forget that 2,000 people died in this war and the Modenese soldiers destroyed most of the city of Bologna in the process. They even destroyed a sluice on the local river so that the Bolognese had no need for a bucket because they couldn’t get water anymore.

Foreword As a true blue Southern girl I have often wondered…if preppies could have their own handbook…why not us? And now at last, my two good friends Deborah Ford and Edie Hand have written the definitive handbook for Southern gals raised in the South. One must simply not leave home without it! It deserves a place on your shelf between Gone With the Wind and the Memphis Junior League cookbook, and I predict in years to come it will be passed down to daughters along with the family silver and great-grandmother’s lace doilies. It is funny, wise, charming, and smart, just like the two gals who wrote it. As modern Southern women we have learned to network with one another and share all the good advice and recipes and rules of accepted behavior that have been handed down to us (it’s a rough world out there). And so in keeping with that wonderful tradition I would like to share some advice my own wise Southern mother gave to me. When I was in high school contemplating whether to take Home Economics or not, my mother exclaimed: “Oh no, darling…you must never learn to cook and clean or they will expect you to do it!” It is advice that has served me well throughout the years. Good luck in all you do! -Fannie Flagg

He found it funny that his socialist friends did not actually want to live in such places either. “I realized that socialism is not a political proposal, not an economic plan. Socialism is the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in community, the goodness of the human race and paradise on earth.

A world that confuses luxury with success, has absolutely zero understanding of the human condition. That's why they idolize rich and filthy celebrities with private jets and rolls royce, as some sort of demigods. If this is your idea of success, then you guys are more disgustingly primitive than the wildlife in the amazon. At least, wild animals don't pretend to be civilized. Riches maketh filth, filth pursue riches. To live a life of luxury, or to dream of a life of luxury, doesn't make us ambitious, it only exposes the moron that we are. A species that has not realized simplicity as the way of life, will never in a million years have a society without disease and disparity. I won't mince my words, and tell you straight. Wanna be a decent human being? Stay away from luxury. Because luxury is a violation of human rights, human health, and above all, human character. It's funny really! Some people can't afford two wholesome meals a day, while others live with a private airport in their backyard. Some parents work their butt off to keep the clothes on their children's back, while others shower their kids with lamborghinis and teslas. If this doesn't open your eyes, perhaps you should try lobotomy. I'm sure you can find some unlicensed surgeon somewhere who'd do it for you if you offer them a trip to the bahamas, or better yet, a trip to space in your own spaceship.

National Public Radio’s long-running show called Car Talk. The show consisted of brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi—both MIT graduates—taking calls from people with questions about their cars. Improbably enough, it was hysterically funny, especially to them. They would laugh endlessly at their own jokes.

Funny how in a material world full of pundits and economists obsessed with assets and liabilities -personally, economically and globally - few speak about the greatest of all these…YOU.

Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age.

Bhutanese believe that economic development should never come at the cost of their people’s happiness. Therefore, in every trade deal the government enters into (for example, the sale of hydroelectric power to neighboring India), culture is valued more than cash.

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it.

I came across Kyla years ago, when she made short videos about the economy that were as funny as they were informative. It was instantly apparent that she had not only mastered the technical details of how the economic machine works; she could also explain it in a way that had so much empathy for the human side of this field. Her work exploded in 2022 when she coined the term “vibecession” to describe a situation in which the economy was technically okay but people still felt glum about it, and their vibes could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a perfect example of understanding the gap between the chalkboard and the real world. Let me tell you: Roughly 0 percent of economic PhDs understand that gap, and exactly 0 percent can explain it like Kyla can.

Us yokels who majored in beer and getting the skirts off Tri-Delts bear no responsibility for Thoreau’s hippie jive or John Kenneth Galbraith’s nitwit economics or Henry Kissinger’s brown-nosing the Shah of Iran. None of us served as models for characters in that greasy Love Story book. Our best and brightest stick to running insurance agencies and don’t go around cozening the nation into Vietnam wars. It wasn’t my school that laid the educational groundwork for FDR’s demagoguery or JFK’s Bay of Pigs slough-off or even Teddy Roosevelt’s fool decision to split the Republican Party and let that buttinski Wilson get elected. You can’t pin the rap on us.

And this is the critical point: in a media world where what people shout overshadows what they actually do, the backlash sometimes appears to be the only dissenter out there, the only movement that has a place for the uncool and the funny-looking and the pious, for all the stock buffoons that our mainstream culture glories in lampooning. In this sense the backlash is becoming a perpetual alter-ego to the culture industry, a feature of American life as permanent and as strange as Hollywood itself. Even as it rejects the broader commercial culture, though, the backlash also mimics it. Conservatism provides its followers with a parallel universe, furnished with all the same attractive pseudospiritual goods as the mainstream: authenticity, rebellion, the nobility of victimhood, even individuality. But the most important similarity between backlash and mainstream commercial culture is that both refuse to think about capitalism critically. Indeed, conservative populism’s total erasure of the economic could only happen in a culture like ours where material politics have already been muted and where the economic has largely been replaced by those aforementioned pseudospiritual fulfillments. This is the basic lie of the backlash, the manipulative strategy that makes the whole senseless parade possible. In all of its rejecting and nay-saying, it resolutely refuses to consider that the assaults on its values, the insults, and the Hollywood sneers are all products of capitalism as surely as are McDonald’s hamburgers and Boeing 737s.

think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among 'the eminent dead, 'but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It's way better than just giving the basic concepts.

NIGEL. Oh, come now. It's not really communism. DOLLY. Don't encourage him! IGOR. How is it not communism? It isn't capitalism-- GRIMM. It isn't even economics.

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy [...] flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?

Funny thing about those Middle Ages,” said Joseph. “They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they’re in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there’s an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can’t deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross.

The money in the chorus isn’t very good, is it?!” she said. “No.” It was less than you’d get for scrubbing floors. The reason was that, when you advertised a dirty floor, hundreds of hopefuls didn’t turn up.

I thought somehow he would sense my disapproval and change his life in order to gain my favor. In short, I withheld love. I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was selfish. And what’s more, it would never work. By withholding love from my friend, he became defensive. He didn’t like me. He thought I was judgmental, snobbish, proud, and mean. Rather than being drawn to me, wanting to change, he was repulsed. I was guilty of using love like money, withholding to get somebody to be who I wanted them to be. I was making a mess of everything. And I was disobeying God...I had fallen miles short of God’s aim...I repented. I replaced economic metaphor with something different, a free gift metaphor, or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the myre, and toward healing. I knew this is the way God loved me. God never withheld love to teach me a lesson. Here is something simple about relationships [I discovered]: nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them... After I repented, things were different. But the difference wasn’t with my friend. The difference was with me. Before I had all this judgementalism and pride and loathing of other people. I hated it. And now I was set free. I was free to love. I didn’t have to discipline anybody, I didn’t have to judge anybody, I could treat everybody as though they were my best friend, as though they were rockstars or famous poets, as though they were amazing, and to me, they became amazing. Especially my new friend. I loved him. After I decided to let go of judging him, I discovered that he was very funny. I mean, really hilarious. And he was smart. Quite brilliant really. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. I felt as though I had lost an enemy, and gained a brother. And then he began to change. It didn’t matter to me whether he did or not, but he did. He began to get a little more serious about God...He was a great human being getting even better. I could feel God’s love for him. I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s. That my part was just to communicate love.