John Mackay Quotes

Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood, Thou art the grisly terror of our age. "Wreck of all order," cry the multitude, "Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage." 0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven The 'truth that lies behind a word to find, To them the word's right meaning was not given. They shall continue blind among the blind. But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true, Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken. I give thee to the future! Thine secure When each at least unto himself shall waken. Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill? I cannot tell - but it the earth shall see! I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will Not rule, & also ruled I will not be!

Ever reviled, accursed,-n'er understood, Thou art the grisly terror of our age. "Wreck of all order," cry the multitude, "Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage." O, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven, The truth that lies behind a word to find, To them the word's right meaning was not given. They shall continue blind among the blind. But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure, That sayest all which I for goal have taken. I give thee to the future! -Thine secure When each at last unto himself shall waken. Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill? I cannot tell......but it the earth shall see! I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!   -John Henry Mackay.

Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the ‘other’ we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it had to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species, as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality. The miracle of the flat inscribable surface and Gutenberg’s genius aside, even the electronic revolution cannot challenge the long-term preeminence of the oral tradition. ("Introduction" by John Foley)

Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

John Milton rose every day at 4 a.m. to write Paradise Lost. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took Edward Gibbon 26 painstaking years to complete. Ernest Hemingway is said to have reviewed The Old Man and the Sea manuscript 80 times before submitting if for publication. It took Noah Webster 36 years to compile Webster’s Dictionary.

A Good Start in Financial History You really can’t learn enough financial history. The following, listed in descending order of importance, are landmarks in the field. Edward Chancellor. Devil Take the Hindmost. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999. What manias look like; how to recognize—and hopefully avoid—irrational exuberance. Benjamin Roth. The Great Depression: A Diary. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. What the bottoms look like; how to keep your courage and your cash up. Roger G. Ibbotson and Gary P. Brinson. Global Investing. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Five hundred years of hard and fiat money, inflation, and security returns in a small, easy-to-read package. Adam Fergusson. When Money Dies. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010; Frederick Taylor. The Downfall of Money. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. What real inflation looks like. Be afraid, very afraid. Benjamin Graham. Security Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. You’re not a pro until you’ve read Graham “in the original”—the first edition, published in 1934. An authentic copy in decent condition will run you at least a grand. Fortunately, McGraw-Hill brought out a facsimile reprint in 1996. Charles Mackay. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Petersfield, U.K.: Harriman House Ltd., 2003. If you were smitten with Devil Take the Hindmost, you’ll love this nineteenth-century look at earlier manias. Sydney Homer and Richard Sylla. A History of Interest Rates, 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Loan markets from 35th-century B.C. Sumer to the present.

And there were also some terrible accidents. Charles Mackay, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, his classic book on speculation (and other departures from reason), tells gleefully a story first told in Blainville’s Travels, that of a young sailor who, for bringing word of a shipment of goods from the Levant, was rewarded by a merchant with a fine red herring for his breakfast. Presently the merchant, who was much involved in the tulip speculation, found missing a bulb of a Semper Augustus worth some 3,000 florins, an unimaginable $25,000 to $50,000 today. When he sought out the sailor to question him, the latter was discovered contentedly finishing the onion, as he had supposed it to be, along with the fish.