Seller Good Quotes

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Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor
Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
The only good thing I've ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
He swept the red cloak around Inej's shoulders in a rain of petals and blossoms as she continued to strap on her knives. She looked almost as startled as the flower seller. "What?" he asked as he tossed her a Mister Crimson mask that matched his own. "Those were my mother's favorite flower." "Good to know Van Eck didn't cure you of sentiment." "Nice to be back, Kaz." "Good to have you back, Wraith.
Leigh Bardugo (Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2))
Diana gave her a measured look and ducked down behind the counter. She came up a moment later with a sword about the length of Clary's forearm. "What do you think of this?" Clary stared at the weapon. It was undoubtedly beautiful. The cross-guard, grip and pommel were gold chased with obsidian, the blade a silver so dark it was nearly black. "It's a shortsword. You might want to look at the other side," said Diana, and she flipped the sword over. On the opposite side of the blade, down the center ridge, ran a pattern of black stars. "Oh." Clary's heart thumped painfully; she took a step away and nearly bumped into Jace, who had come up behind her, frowning. "That's a Morgenstern sword." "Yes, it is." The sword-seller's eyes were shrewd. "Long ago the Morgensterns commissioned two blades from Wayland the Smith-a matched set. You have doubtless seen the the larger sword already, for Valentine Morgenstern carried it, and now his son carries it after him." "You know who we are," Jace said. It wasn't a question. "Who Clary is." "The Shadowhunter world is small," said Diana, and she looked from one of them to the other. "I'm on the Council. I've seen you give testimony, Valentine's daughter." Clary looked doubtfully at the blade. "I've seen two men bear the larger version of that sword, and I hated them both. There are no Morgensterns in this world now who are dedicated to anything but evil." Jace said, "There's you." "I'll give it to you," said Diana. "You're right that people hate the Morgensterns; it's not the sort of item I could sell elsewhere. Or would necessarily want to. It should go to good hands." "I don't want it," Clary said. "If you flinch from it, you give it power over you," said Diana. "Take it, and cut your brother's throat with it, and reclaim the honor of your blood.
Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
Yes, his reputation is tainted. But which leader in this world doesn’t have a tainted reputation? Power is not a good thing. And the ones who wield it can never please all the people no matter how good their intentions are. Only a candy seller can please everyone.
Abhaidev (The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit)
There are no good or bad people in this world; only choices.
David Seller
The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope. We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
There weren’t many good things to be said or felt about my situation. Not many at all. But the rule is that after any engagement, won or lost, you replay it in you mind to see how much you can learn. So that’s what I did...
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
It’s good that you feel bad,’ she said, after some thought. Not much thought, obviously, but some. ‘If you felt nothing, it would mean there is no love, no passion. And we are nothing without passion.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy? Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question. O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre. P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre. O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction. P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that. (Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
Terry Pratchett
A business is not just a legal entity - it’s a group of people engaged in the voluntary exchange of products, services, agreements and currencies. Buyers and sellers determine whether a business is a business. Not it’s legal entity status given by the state. I think legal status is good, but it’s not what truly establishes a business.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana (The Use and Misuse of Children)
Imagine that you have to break someone's arm. Right or left, doesn't matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don't...well, that doesn't matter either. Let's just say bad things will happen if you don't. Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly -- snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint -- or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable? Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer. Unless. Unless unless unless. What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (FSG Classics))
Maya Angelou entered our lives at Virago in 1984, when we first published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. "Entered our lives" is too tame. She danced, sang, and laughed her way straight into our hearts. She brought us a best-seller, but more than that, she brought us a reminder that the human need for dignity and recognition is a gift easily given to one another, but also frighteningly easy to withhold.
Lennie Goodings
Did you ever think our misfortune is directly related to your good fortune? Maybe the house your parents bought was on the market because the sellers didn't want my mama in the neighborhood. Maybe the good grades that eventually led you to law school were possible because your mama didn't have to work eighteen hours a day, and was there to read to you at night, or make sure you did your homework. How often do you remind yourself how lucky you are that you own your house, because you were able to build up equity through generations in a way families of color can't? How often do you open your mouth at work and think how awesome it is that no one's thinking you're speaking for everyone with the same skin color you have? How hard is it for you to find the greeting card for your baby's birthday with a picture of a child that has the same color skin as her? How many times have you seen a painting of Jesus that looks like you? Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.
Jodi Picoult (Small Great Things)
If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
Ryan Holiday (Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts)
I didn’t really know the answer to this myself, but saying that wasn’t going to get me off the hook. I started talking without any clear idea of what was going to come out. ‘Because sex causes more unhappiness than it gives pleasure,’ I said. ‘Because men and women want different things, and one of them always ends up being disappointed. Because I don’t get asked much, and I hate asking. Because I’m not very good at it. Because I’m used to being on my own. Because I can’t think of anymore reason.’ I paused for breath. ‘All right,’ said Ronnie. She turned and started walking backwards so she could get a good view of my face. ‘Which of those is the real one?’ ‘B,’ I said, after a bit of thought.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
I am a harmless old seller of apples," she said, in a voice more appropriate for the opening of hostilities in a middle-range war. "Pray let me past, dearie." The last word had knives in it. "No-one must enter the castle," said one of the guards. "Orders of the duke." Granny shrugged. The apple-seller gambit had never worked more than once in the entire history of witchcraft, as far as she knew, but it was traditional. "I know you, Champett Poldy," she said. "I recall I laid out your grandad and I brought you into the world." She glanced at the crowds, which had regathered a little way off, and turned back to the guard, whose face was already a mask of terror. She leaned a little closer, and said, "I gave you your first good hiding in this valley of tears and by all the gods if you cross me now I will give you your last." There was a soft metallic noise as the spear fell out of the man's fearful fingers. Granny reached and gave the trembling man a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "But don't worry about it," she added. "Have an apple.
Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6; Witches, #2))
A good negotiator flatters the seller not the product.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
The feelings are overwhelming, but they’re not you. They’re the feelings. You are separate, and you are strong and amazing and good.
Heather Sellers (You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness)
In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.
Ryan Holiday (Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts)
If you're going to go and buy a load of stolen goods, you can't take a whole crowd of friends with you. The presence of third parties reduces the prospective seller to a clamlike condition.
Sarah Caudwell (Thus Was Adonis Murdered (Hilary Tamar, #1))
It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well as do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
When I thought about it, though, what I liked best about the session was that Helder said fuck. A good, hard word, a word with a life of its own, a fearless word. A rent in the dry elegance. Fuck.
Heather Sellers (You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness)
Writing a NYT bestseller was a delightful experience. But there are many books which are read by few that should be read and reread by many, as well as books bought by many that are hardly worth the ink.
Ron Brackin
We are all complicit. We've allowed the "market" to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
We are all complicit. We 've allowed the 'market' to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
People buy perceived value. It’s not just about having a good product or service, it’s also about making sure your potential customers perceive the value your product or service can provide them. And you do this by communicating its value effectively.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Business for Beginners: Getting Started)
There once was a man who went to see a psychiatrist, crippled by a fear of flying. His phobia was based on the belief that there would be a bomb on any plane he boarded. The psychiatrist tried to shift the phobia but couldn‘t, so he sent his patient to a statistician. The statistician prodded a calculator and informed the man that the odds against there being a bomb on board the next flight he took were half a million to one. The man still wasn’t happy, and sat there convinced that he’d be on that one plane out of half a million. So the statistician prodded the calculator again and said ‘all right, would you feel safer if the odds were ten million to one against?’ The man said, yes, of course he would. So the statistician said ‘the odds against there being two, separate, unrelated bombs on board your next flight are exactly ten million to one against.’ The man looked puzzled, and said ‘that’s all well and good, but how does it help me?’ The statistician replied: ‘It’s very simple. You take a bomb on board with you.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them … with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society, and that general fairness that cements mankind.
John Locke (Locke: Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought))
Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce reigns. ‘Financial systems make venal souls.’ Their secret workings are a ‘means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block’.
Pankaj Mishra (Age of Anger: A History of the Present)
Standing out there on the street, I realized that every person nearby--children, seniors, hardworking parents, and, yes, buyers, sellers, and users--was my neighbor. In major world religions, there is no commandment more fundamental than to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Now I was being challenged to manifest that love: this was a test of my love, of my vision. The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you.
Cory Booker (United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good)
They were not serving the public interest, but their immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own, and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these sellers.
Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward: 2000-1887)
Peter Sellers offered me a small part opposite him in a rather good scene where Sir Guy Grand purchases a ‘School of Rembrandt’ portrait and then cuts out the nose of it with a knife, explaining to my character (a snotty young art dealer) that he only collects noses. I, of course, have to react with horror, and I exclaim ‘Shit!’ This was quite a naughty word in 1968 – so naughty, in fact, that when, some months later, my scene was shown on television to promote the movie I became, as far as I know, the first person ever to say ‘shit’ on British television. (This, incidentally, is one of my three claims to fame: the others are that I have a species of lemur named after me, and that I was once French-kissed – on camera – by Tim Curry.)
John Cleese (So, Anyway...: The Autobiography)
Cannes was to blame, he told himself defensively. It was a city made for the indulgence of the senses, all ease and sunshine and provocative flesh. “What had he seen, what had he learned? He had seen all kinds of movies, good and bad, mostly bad. He had been plunged into a carnival, a delirium of film. In the halls, on the terraces, on the beach, at the parties, the art or industry or whatever it deserved to be called in these few days was exposed at its essence. The whole thing was there—the artists and pseudo-artists, the businessmen, the con men, the buyers and sellers, the peddlers, the whores, the pornographers, critics, hangers-on, the year’s heroes, the year’s failures. And then the distillation of what it was all about, a film of Bergman's and one of Bunuel's, pure and devastating.
Irwin Shaw (Evening in Byzantium)
If I'm buying an appliance a review is useful because it refers to functionality, which is a very black and white issue. Either a toaster works well or it burns the bread. As for entertainment, I have never and will never read a review before I experience a book or movie for myself. Whether or not a book is good is a matter of opinion. I was born with a brain of my own and am perfectly capable of forming my own opinion. I have never needed anyone to tell me what to read and how to feel about it. There have been award winning best sellers that I have absolutely hated. There have been stories that were heavily criticized that I truly enjoyed. I'm an individual and no one else's opinion is relevant when it comes to my entertainment. Has our society devolved to the point that people are incapable of forming their own opinions and must therefor read someone else's opinion first?
Catalina DuBois
481 I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been. After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing. Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life. The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition)
Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave.
Paul Fleischman (Seedfolks)
way I dealt with that great classic of modern adventure, Kon-Tiki Months later, watching this book remain first on the best-seller list for unbelievable week after week, I was able to rationalize my blindness by saying to myself that if McGraw-Hill had paid me more than ninety cents an hour I might have been more sensitive to the nexus between good books and filthy lucre.
William Styron (Sophie's Choice)
April 26th, 2014 is not only the day of the Alamogordo dig, it’s also my mother’s 78th birthday. How perfect is that? Without her, I wouldn’t be here. Of course, with her I might not be here either. She didn’t want me to go to Atari. When I announced I was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go make games, she told me I was throwing my life away. She told me I wasn’t her son, because no child of hers would do such a stupid thing. She came around though. After I made several million-sellers and put an addition on her home, she told me it was a good thing I had listened to her and gone into computers. This may shed some light on how my background prepared me for becoming a therapist, and before that a client. After all, if it weren’t for families, there would be no therapists.
Howard Scott Warshaw (Once Upon Atari: How I made history by killing an industry)
The maker of an advertised article knows the manufacturing side and probably the dealers side. But this very knowledge often leads him astray in respect to customers. His interests are not in their interests. The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else. This book will contain no more important chapter than this one on salesmanship. The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship. Ads are planned and written with some utterly wrong conception. They are written to please the seller. The interest of the buyer are forgotten. One can never sell goods profitably, in person or in print, when that attitude exists.
Claude C. Hopkins (Scientific Advertising)
The third way you can incentivize the seller to accept your initial offer is by offering a sizable nonrefundable deposit. You can offer this after your short due diligence expires, or after you are certain your loan will be approved. Again, this indicates that you are serious about the property and that you fully intend to make the deal happen. A nonrefundable deposit is a layer of protection for the seller, and the fact that you are offering it up front demonstrates good faith on your part. This makes you a very attractive buyer.
Manny Khoshbin (Manny Khoshbin's Contrarian PlayBook)
I remember the time I went to my first rare-book fair and saw how the first editions of Thoreau and Whitman and Crane had been carefully packaged in heat-shrunk plastic with the price tags on the inside. Somehow the simple addition of air-tight plastic bags had transformed the books from vehicles of liveliness into commodities, like bread made with chemicals to keep it from perishing. In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller where both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange. The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire. He is a stranger seduced into feeding on the drippings of someone else’s capital without benefit of its inner nourishment, and he is hungry at the end of the meal, depressed and weary as we all feel when lust has dragged us from the house and led us to nothing.
Lewis Hyde (The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property)
Ethics has three levels, the good for self, the good for others, and the good for the transcendent purpose of a life.1 The good for self is the prudence by which you self-cultivate, learning to play the cello, say, or practicing centering prayer. Self-denial is not automatically virtuous. (How many self-denying mothers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: I’ll just sit here in the dark.) The good for a transcendent purpose is the faith, hope, and love to pursue an answer to the question “So what?” The family, science, art, the football club, God give the answers that humans seek. The middle level is attention to the good for others. The late first-century BCE Jewish sage Hillel of Babylon put it negatively yet reflexively: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself.” It’s masculine, a guy-liberalism, a gospel of justice, roughly the so-called Non-Aggression Axiom as articulated by libertarians since the word “libertarian” was redirected in the 1950s to a (then) right-wing liberalism. Matt Kibbe puts it well in the title of his 2014 best seller, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.2 On the other hand, the early first-century CE Jewish sage Jesus of Nazareth put it positively: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s gal-liberalism, a gospel of love, placing upon us an ethical responsibility to do more than pass by on the other side. Be a good Samaritan. Be nice. In
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All)
Bezos had seemingly made up his mind that he was no longer going to indulge in financial maneuvering as a way to escape the rather large hole Amazon had dug for itself, and it wasn’t just through borrowing Sinegal’s business plan. At a two-day management and board offsite later that year, Amazon invited business thinker Jim Collins to present the findings from his soon-to-be-published book Good to Great. Collins had studied the company and led a series of intense discussions at the offsite. “You’ve got to decide what you’re great at,” he told the Amazon executives. Drawing on Collins’s concept of a flywheel, or self-reinforcing loop, Bezos and his lieutenants sketched their own virtuous cycle, which they believed powered their business. It went something like this: Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop. Amazon executives were elated; according to several members of the S Team at the time, they felt that, after five years, they finally understood their own business. But when Warren Jenson asked Bezos if he should put the flywheel in his presentations to analysts, Bezos asked him not to. For now, he considered it the secret sauce.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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