Succeed In Private Quotes

We're going on a, um, windmill tour later this week." If I'd wanted to shut them all up, I'd definitely succeeded. They all looked stunned. Adrian spoke first. "I'm going to assume that means he's flying you to Amsterdam on his private jet. If so, I'd like to come along. But not for the windmills.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.

We're going on a, um, windmill tour later this week." If I'd wanted to shut them all up, I'd definitely succeeded. They all looked stunned. Adrian spoke first. "I'm going to assume that means he's flying you to Amsterdam on his private jet. If so, I'd like to come along. But not for the windmills.

Ivan Ilych had been a colleague of the gentlemen present and was liked by them all. He had been ill for some weeks with an illness said to be incurable. His post had been kept open for him, but there had been conjectures that in case of his death Alexeev might receive his appointment, and that either Vinnikov or Shtabel would succeed Alexeev. So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilych's death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in that private room was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon. After many centuries of hopelessness and superstition, St. George, in the guise of Rationality, appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested for a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. During the nineteenth century, his lance was never still, prodding this way and that against the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence. But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire. The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life. He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes—the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by.

In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility, selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is 'the rose plucked from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human life into its various threads of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves, – seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy – mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; – have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

He is my other eyes that can see above the clouds; my other ears that hear above the winds. He is the part of me that can reach out into the sea. He has told me a thousand times over that I am his reason for being; by the way he rests against my leg; by the way he thumps his tail at my smallest smile; by the way he shows his hurt when I leave without taking him. (I think it makes him sick with worry when he is not along to care for me.) When I am wrong, he is delighted to forgive. When I am angry, he clowns to make me smile. When I am happy, he is joy unbounded. When I am a fool, he ignores it. When I succeed, he brags. Without him, I am only another man. With him, I am all-powerful. He is loyalty itself. He has taught me the meaning of devotion. With him, I know a secret comfort and a private peace. He has brought me understanding where before I was ignorant. His head on my knee can heal my human hurts. His presence by my side is protection against my fears of dark and unknown things. He has promised to wait for me... whenever... wherever - in case I need him. And I expect I will - as I always have. He is just my dog.

A bad composition carries its own punishment—contempt and ridicule; a good one excites envy and entails upon its author a thousand mortifications; he finds himself assailed by partial and ill-humored criticism; one man finds fault with the plan, another with the style, a third with the precept which strives to inculcate; and they who cannot succeed in finding fault with the book, employ themselves in stigmatizing its author: they maliciously rake out from obscurity every little circumstance which may throw ridicule upon his private character or conduct and aim at wounding the man since they cannot hurt the writer.

Dynasties of felines, as numerous as the dynasties of Egyptian kings, succeeded each other in our home. Accident, flight, or death accounted for them in turns. They were all beloved and regretted; but life is made up of forgetfulness, and the remembrance of cats passes away like the remembrance of men.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the center of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are catholics with protestant proclivities, or christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to allow each other to do their own thinking. Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. He should not be compelled to give his opinion as to the inspiration of the bible, the propriety of infant baptism, or the immaculate conception. All these things are private and personal. The people ought to be wise enough to select as their officers men who know something of political affairs, who comprehend the present greatness, and clearly perceive the future grandeur of our country. If we were in a storm at sea, with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism. Our government has nothing to do with religion. It is neither christian nor pagan; it is secular. But as long as the people persist in voting for or against men on account of their religious views, just so long will hypocrisy hold place and power. Just so long will the candidates crawl in the dust—hide their opinions, flatter those with whom they differ, pretend to agree with those whom they despise; and just so long will honest men be trampled under foot.

The mystery for why some people you know succeed or fail in life is how courageous they are in pulling people aside and how effective they are in those private conversations we never see.

She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.

As a matter of fact, states everywhere are highly intent on outlawing or at least controlling even the mere possession of arms by private citizens—and most states have indeed succeeded in this task—as an armed man is clearly more of a threat to any aggressor than an unarmed man. It bears much less risk for the state to keep things peaceful while its own aggression continues, if rifles with which the taxman could be shot are out of the reach of everyone except the taxman himself!

We wanted the administration to succeed and supported significant components of the president’s agenda, but we were alarmed by his unstable behavior, in public and private.

People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary, but bizarre. He remembered with what excitement he had listened, at the age of twenty, to the Reith Lectures delivered on BBC Radio by Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist and interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, a year earlier, had succeeded Noel Annan as provost of King’s. “Far from being the basis of the good society,” Leach had said, “the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Yes! he thought. Yes! That is a thing I also know. The families in the novels he later wrote would be explosive, operatic, arm-waving, exclamatory, wild. People who did not like his books would sometimes criticize these fictional families for being unrealistic—not “ordinary” enough. However, readers who did like his books said to him, “Those families are exactly like my family.

Wisdom and integrity cannot be found in any single domain. A broader viewpoint that breaks across disciplinary boundaries is needed, a way of understanding that combines knowing and sensing, feeling and judging. In facing this task one cannot expect to succeed in the public eye, as one can when a field of culture recognizes one’s contributions to art, business, or science. But by this time a person aspiring to wisdom knows that the bottom line of a well-lived life is not so much success but the certainty we reach, in the most private fibers of our being, that our existence is linked in a meaningful way with the rest of the universe.

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.

would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to convert radiant sunlight into moral strength. Using it to waft peace throughout the universe, Zi

The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism." [...] "I’m sorry. I’m impressed with Hitler’s ability to use socialist prattle when necessary, and then discard it. He uses doctrines as he uses money, to get things done. They’re expendable. He uses racism because that’s the pure distillate of German romantic egotism, just as Lenin used utopian Marxism because it appealed to Russia’s messianic streak. Hitler means to hammer out a united Europe.... He understands them, and he may just succeed. A unified Europe must come. The medieval jigsaw of nations is obsolete. The balance of power is dangerous foolishness in the industrial age. It must all be thrown out. Somebody has to be ruthless enough to do it, since the peoples with their ancient hatreds will never do it themselves. It’s only Napoleon’s original vision, but he was a century ahead of his time.

Unlike the gifts men give each other that are meant to be widely circulated throughout society, gifts between women are meant to be possessed as private treasure forever, accruing vast social powers for the family over succeeding generations

And no one man's belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone. Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

Only one further prize remained on the entire North Pacific coast, the peninsula of Korea. Although Japan clearly regarded Korea as essential to her security, a group of Russian adventurers resolved to steal it. Their plan was to establish a private company, the Yalu Timber Company, and begin moving Russian soldiers into Korea disguised as workmen. If they ran into trouble, the Russian government could always disclaim responsibility. If they succeeded, the empire would acquire a new province and they themselves would have vast economic concessions within it.

but let me, as an old man, who ought by this time to have profited by experience, say that when I was younger, I found I often misinterpreted the intentions of people, and found they did not mean what at the time I supposed they meant; and, further, that as a general rule, it was better to be a little dull of apprehension, where phrases seemed to imply pique, and quick in perception, when on the contrary they seemed to imply kindly feeling. The real truth never fails ultimately to appear; and opposing parties if wrong, are sooner convinced when replied to forbearingly, than when overwhelmed. All I mean to say is, that it is better to be blind to the results of partisanship, and quick to see good will. One has more happiness in oneself, in endeavoring to follow the things that make for peace. You can hardly imagine how often I have been heated in private when opposed, as I have thought unjustly and superciliously, and yet I have striven, and succeeded I hope, in keeping down replies of the like kind. And I know I have never lost by it. I would not say all this to you did I not esteem, you as a true philosopher and friend.

As it was her lot that she had to go through the frustrations, disillusionments, privations, failures, and obstacles on her way to succeed—she will be strong enough to survive them, never giving up. Hardships occur to build a person’s character. The world is perfect, with all its imperfections.

Work is freighted with difficulty and possibility of visible failure, failure to provide, to succeed, to make a difference, to be seen and to be seen to be seen. Work, therefore is robust vulnerability, and a good part of the time, a journey leading us through very unbeautiful private and public humiliations.

We come into contact with people only with our exteriors—physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body; the one hidden, the other open. The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private self because it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. He learns he can keep secrets—at first an excruciating, intolerable burden: it seems that the outer world has every right to penetrate into his self and that the parents could automatically do so if they wished—they always seem to know just what he is thinking and feeling. But then he discovers that he can lie and not be found out: it is a great and liberating moment, this anxious first lie—it represents the staking out of his claim to an integral inner self, free from the prying eyes of the world. By the time we grow up we become masters at dissimulation, at cultivating a self that the world cannot probe. But we pay a price. After years of turning people away, of protecting our inner self, of cultivating it by living in a different world, of furnishing this world with our fantasies and dreams—we find that we are hopelessly separated from everyone else. We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself. We emit huge globs of love to our parents and spouses, and the glob slithers away in exchanges of words that are somehow beside the point of what we are trying to say. People seem to keep bumping up against each other with their exteriors and falling away from each other. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the modern master of this aspect of the human tragedy. Take even the sexual act—the most intimate merger given to organisms. For most people, even for their entire lives, it is simply a joining of exteriors. The insides melt only in the moment of orgasm, but even this is brief, and a melting is not a communication. It is a physical overcoming of separateness, not a symbolic revelation and justification of one’s interior. Many people pursue sex precisely because it is a mystique of the overcoming of the separateness of the inner world; and they go from one partner to another because they can never quite achieve “it.” So the endless interrogations: “What are you thinking about right now—me? Do you feel what I feel? Do you love me?

Hamilton’s second pamphlet made clear his maturing belief that private interest was the glue that would hold American society together and make it succeed. Just as long as Americans learned to rein in their impulse toward unbridled greed and could control, channel, and regulate their prosperity for the public good, they would be invincible even against English military might. 22

That acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people increasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to create their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those amenities as public services to everyone else.

Premature examination of his files might ruin his private, undefined Plan. Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war.

Judged in terms of its own aspirations, the Communist regime was a monumental failure; it succeeded in one thing only - staying in power. But since for Bolsheviks power was not an end in itself but means to en end, its mere retention does not qualify the experiment as a success. The Bolsheviks made no secret of their aims: toppling everywhere regimes based on private property and replacing them with a worldwide union of socialist societies. They succeeded nowhere outside the boundaries of what had been the Russian Empire in spreading their regime until the end of World War II, when the Red Army stepped into the vacuum created in Eastern Europe by the surrender of Germany, the Chinese Communists seized control of their country from the Japanese, and Communist dictatorships, aided by Moscow, established themselves in a number of recently emancipated colonial areas.

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that almost every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for a time, or in particular instances, actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested; but they are not of themselves sufficient to produce persevering conformity to the refined dictates and obligations of social duty. Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed.

From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.

It would indeed be privilege if, for example, as has sometimes been the case in the past, landed property were reserved to members of the nobility. And it is privilege if, as is true in our time, the right to produce or sell particular things is reserved to particular people designated by authority. But to call private property as such, which all can acquire under the same rules, a privilege, because only some succeed in acquiring it, is depriving the word “privilege” of its meaning.

Suicide prohibitions have not succeeded in preventing suicides but have succeeded in preventing people from having an honest, private conversation about life and death. Those persons who trust mental health professionals with their innermost thoughts may quickly find themselves punished with a “seventy-two-hour hold” or worse. Suicidal persons and their would-be helpers alike are paralyzed by prohibitionist censorship, deception, and legislation requiring the betrayal of trust. The first and major victim of the war on suicide, as in all wars, is loss of liberty.

An Author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an Animal whom everybody is privileged to attack; For though All are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them. A good one excites envy, and entails upon its Author a thousand mortifications. He finds himself assailed by partial and ill-humoured Criticism: One Man finds fault with the plan, Another with the style, a Third with the precept, which it strives to inculcate; and they who cannot succeed in finding fault with the Book, employ themselves in stigmatizing its Author. They maliciously rake out from obscurity every little circumstance which may throw ridicule upon his private character or conduct, and aim at wounding the Man, since They cannot hurt the Writer.

Ambiguous tasks are a good place to observe how personality traits bubble to the surface. Although few of us are elite soldiers, we’ve all experienced the kind of psychological distress these trainees encounter on their training run: managing unclear expectations, struggling with self-motivation, and balancing the use of social support with private reflection. These issues are endemic not only to the workplace, but also to relationships, health, and every aspect of life in which we seek to thrive and succeed. Not surprisingly, the leading predictor of success in elite military training programs is the same quality that distinguishes those best equipped to resolve marital conflict, to achieve favorable deal terms in business negotiations, and to bestow the gifts of good parenting on their children: the ability to tolerate psychological discomfort.

INTRODUCTION It has long been the opinion of many of the more progressive teachers of the United States that, next to Herakles, Odysseus is the hero closest to child-life, and that the stories from the "Odyssey" are the most suitable for reading-lessons. These conclusions have been reached through independent experiments not related to educational work in foreign countries. While sojourning in Athens I had the pleasure of visiting the best schools, both public and private, and found the reading especially spirited. I examined the books in use and found the regular reading-books to consist of the classic tales of the country, the stories of Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, and so forth, in the reader succeeding the primer, and the stories of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as we commonly call him, following as a third book, answering to our second or third reader.

If a society, a city, or a territory, were to guarantee the necessaries of life to its inhabitants (and we shall see how the conception of the necessaries of life can be so extended as to include luxuries), it would be compelled to take possession of what is absolutely needed for production; that is to say — land, machinery, factories, means of transport, etc. Capital in the hands of private owners would be expropriated and returned to the community. The great harm done by bourgeois society, as we have already mentioned, is not only that capitalists seize a large share of the profits of each industrial and commercial enterprise, thus enabling them to live without working, but that all production has taken a wrong direction, as it is not carried on with a view to securing well-being to all. For this reason we condemn it. Moreover, it is impossible to carry on mercantile production in everybody’s interest. To wish it would be to expect the capitalist to go beyond his province and to fulfill duties that he cannot fulfill without ceasing to be what he is — a private manufacturer seeking his own enrichment. Capitalist organization, based on the personal interest of each individual trader, has given all that could be expected of it to society — it has increased the productive force of work. The capitalist, profiting by the revolution effected in industry by steam, by the sudden development of chemistry and machinery, and by other inventions of our century, has endeavoured in his own interest to increase the yield of work, and in a great measure he has succeeded. But to attribute other duties to him would be unreasonable. For example, to expect that he should use this superior yield of work in the interest of society as a whole, would be to ask philanthropy and charity of him, and a capitalist enterprise cannot be based on charity.

The Poet" The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry His power is his left hand It is idle weak and precious His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light which never was On land or sea. He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess That extreme form of success. He may suffer Narcissus' destiny Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation Love, blind, adoring, overflowing Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love quickly or immediately. ...The poet must be innocent and ignorant But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong point Therefore Cocteau said, "What would I not give To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from existence? I would give to Satan my immortal soul." This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which he wished to redeem, Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of youth's banality, vulgarity, pomp and affectation of his early works of poetry. So too in the same way a Famous American Poet When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies of his first book of poems which had been privately printed by himself at his own expense. He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them And learned then how the last copies were extant, As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital, at the Library of Congress. Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two copies Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author, Since they were his books and his property he was reproached But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him Thus setting a national precedent. For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems, For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard spoke the terrifying truth: "Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record your acts for the rest of eternity." What a terrifying thing to say! This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry. This is also the joy everlasting of poetry. Delmore Schwartz

Burns, a former Secret Service agent, had succeeded Pinkerton as the world’s most celebrated private eye. A short, stout man, with a luxuriant mustache and a shock of red hair, Burns had once aspired to be an actor, and he cultivated a mystique, in part by writing pulp detective stories about his cases. In one such book, he declared, “My name is William J. Burns, and my address is New York, London, Paris, Montreal, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and wherever else a law-abiding citizen may find need of men who know how to go quietly about throwing out of ambush a hidden assassin or drawing from cover criminals who prey upon those who walk straight.” Though dubbed a “front-page detective” for his incessant self-promotion, he had an impressive track record, including catching those responsible for the 1910 bombing of the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, which killed twenty people. The New York Times called Burns “perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius, whom this country has produced,” and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave him the moniker he longed for: “America’s Sherlock Holmes.

In the early stages of the state, taxes are light in their incidence, but fetch in a large revenue; in the later stages the incidence of taxation increases while the aggregate revenue falls off. Now where taxes and imposts are light, private individuals are encouraged to engage actively in business; enterprise develops, because business men feel it worth their while, in view of the small share of their profits which they have to give up in the form of taxation. And as business prospers the number of taxes increases and the total yield of taxation grows. As time passes and kings succeed each other, they lose their tribal habits in favour of more civilized ones. Their needs and exigencies grow.... owing to the luxury in which they have been brought up. Hence they impose fresh taxes on their subjects -farmers, peasants, and others subject to taxation; sharply raise the rate of old taxes to increase their yield; and impose sales taxes and octrois, as we shall describe later. These increases grow with the spread of luxurious habits in the state, and the consequent growth in needs and public expenditure, until taxation burdens the subjects and deprives them of their gains. People get accustomed to this high level of taxation, because the increases have come about gradually, without anyone’s being aware of who exactly it was who raised the rates of the old taxes or imposed the new ones. But the effects on business of this rise in taxation make themselves felt. For business men are soon discouraged by the comparison of their profits with the burden of their taxes, and between their output and their net profits. Consequently production falls off, and with it the yield of taxation. The rulers may, mistakenly, try to remedy this decrease in the yield of taxation by raising the rate of the taxes; hence taxes and imposts reach a level which leaves no profits to business men, owing to high costs of production, heavy burden of taxation, and inadequate net profits. This process of higher tax rates and lower yields (caused by the government’s belief that higher rates result in higher returns) may go on until production begins to decline owing to the despair of business men, and to affect population. The main injury of this process is felt by the state, just as the main benefit of better business conditions is enjoyed by it. From this you must understand that the most important factor making for business prosperity is to lighten as much as possible the burden of taxation on business men, in order to encourage enterprise by giving assurance of greater profits.

This revolution in the role of government has been accompanied, and largely produced, by an achievement in public persuasion that must have few rivals. Ask yourself what products are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling, railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household appliances, television and radio sets, hi-fi equipment, computers, and, we would add, supermarkets and shopping centers would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement. Yet the public—or a large part of it—has been persuaded that private enterprises produce shoddy products, that we need ever vigilant government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe, meretricious products at outrageous prices on ignorant, unsuspecting, vulnerable customers. That public relations campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal service the far more critical task of producing and distributing energy.

The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before

The future of democracy in developed countries will depend on their ability to deal with the problem of a disappearing middle class. In the wake of the financial crisis there has been a rise of new populist groups from the Tea Party in the United States to various anti-EU, anti-immigrant parties in Europe. What unites all of them is the belief that elites in their countries have betrayed them. And in many ways they are correct: the elites who set the intellectual and cultural climate in the developed world have been largely buffered from the effects of middle-class decline. There has been a vacuum in new approaches to the problem, approaches that don’t involve simply returning to the welfare state solutions of the past. The proper approach to the problem of middle-class decline is not necessarily the present German system or any other specific set of measures. The only real long-term solution would be an educational system that succeeded in pushing the vast majority of citizens into higher levels of education and skills. The ability to help citizens flexibly adjust to the changing conditions of work requires state and private institutions that are similarly flexible. Yet one of the characteristics of modern developed democracies is that they have accumulated many rigidities over time that make institutional adaptation increasingly difficult. In fact, all political systems—past and present—are liable to decay. The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will

And mind you, Hermine, even though such abusive articles cannot annoy me any longer, they often sadden me all the same. Two-thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and simple. Any one could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment's reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the world's confusion and wickedness-look you, nobody wants to do that. And so there's no stopping it, and the next war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day. It has paralysed me since I knew it, and brought me to despair. I have no country and no ideals left. All that comes to nothing but decorations for the gentlemen by whom the next slaughter is ushered in. There is no sense in thinking or saying or writing anything of human import, to bother one's head with thoughts of goodness for two or three men who do that, there are thousands of papers, periodicals, speeches, meetings in public and in private, that make the opposite their daily endeavor and succeed in it too.

I don’t believe in love that never ends,” said Aiden, his whisper clear and distinct. “I don’t believe in being true until death or finding the other half of your soul.” Harvard raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. Privately, he considered that it might be good that Aiden hadn’t delivered this speech to this guy he apparently liked so much—whom Aiden had never even mentioned to his best friend before now. This speech was not romantic. Once again, Harvard had to wonder if what he’d been assuming was Aiden’s romantic prowess had actually been many guys letting Aiden get away with murder because he was awfully cute. But Aiden sounded upset, and that spoke to an instinct in Harvard natural as breath. He put his arm around Aiden, and drew his best friend close against him, warm skin and soft hair and barely there shirt and all, and tried to make a sound that was more soothing than fraught. “I don’t believe in songs or promises. I don’t believe in hearts or flowers or lightning strikes.” Aiden snatched a breath as though it was his last before drowning. “I never believed in anything but you.” “Aiden,” said Harvard, bewildered and on the verge of distress. He felt as if there was something he wasn’t getting here. Even more urgently, he felt he should cut off Aiden. It had been a mistake to ask. This wasn’t meant for Harvard, but for someone else, and worse than anything, there was pain in Aiden’s voice. That must be stopped now. Aiden kissed him, startling and fierce, and said against Harvard’s mouth, “Shut up. Let me… let me.” Harvard nodded involuntarily, because of the way Aiden had asked, unable to deny Aiden even things Harvard should refuse to give. Aiden’s warm breath was running down into the small shivery space between the fabric of Harvard’s shirt and his skin. It was panic-inducing, feeling all the impulses of Harvard’s body and his heart like wires that were not only crossed but also impossibly tangled. Disentangling them felt potentially deadly. Everything inside him was in electric knots. “I’ll let you do anything you want,” Harvard told him, “but don’t—don’t—” Hurt yourself. Seeing Aiden sad was unbearable. Harvard didn’t know what to do to fix it. The kiss had turned the air between them into dry grass or kindling, a space where there might be smoke or fire at any moment. Aiden was focused on toying with the collar of Harvard’s shirt, Aiden’s brows drawn together in concentration. Aiden’s fingertips glancing against his skin burned. “You’re so warm,” Aiden said. “Nothing else ever was. I only knew goodness existed because you were the best. You’re the best of everything to me.” Harvard made a wretched sound, leaning in to press his forehead against Aiden’s. He’d known Aiden was lonely, that the long line of guys wasn’t just to have fun but tied up in the cold, huge manor where Aiden had spent his whole childhood, in Aiden’s father with his flat shark eyes and sharp shark smile, and in the long line of stepmothers who Aiden’s father chose because he had no use for people with hearts. Harvard had always known Aiden’s father wanted to crush the heart out of Aiden. He’d always worried Aiden’s father would succeed. Aiden said, his voice distant even though he was so close, “I always knew all of you was too much to ask for.” Harvard didn’t know what to say, so he obeyed a wild foolish impulse, turned his face the crucial fraction toward Aiden’s, and kissed him. Aiden sank into the kiss with a faint sweet noise, as though he’d finally heard Harvard’s wordless cry of distress and was answering it with belated reassurance: No, I’ll be all right. We’re not lost. The idea of anyone not loving Aiden back was unimaginable, but it had clearly happened. Harvard couldn’t think of how to say it, so he tried to make the kiss say it. I’m so sorry you were in pain. I never guessed. I’m sorry I can’t fix this, but I would if I could. He didn’t love you, but I do.

Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that therein lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war. They don’t forgive me that, for, of course, they are themselves all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the papers. Not one of them has the least thing to blame himself for. Not one has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even though a few million men lie under the ground. And mind you, Hermine, even though such abusive articles cannot annoy me any longer, they often sadden me all the same. Two-thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and simple. Any one could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment’s reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the world’s confusion and wickedness—look you, nobody wants to do that. And so there’s no stopping it, and the next war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day. It has paralysed me since I knew it, and brought me to despair. I have no country and no ideals left. All that comes to nothing but decorations for the gentlemen by whom the next slaughter is ushered in. There is no sense in thinking or saying or writing anything of human import, to bother one’s head with thoughts of goodness—for two or three men who do that, there are thousands of papers, periodicals, speeches, meetings in public and in private, that make the opposite their daily endeavor and succeed in it too.

I receive the reward for my willingness to participate in the object-subject reversal in the form of a private illumination - in the present case, as an aesthetic movedness. The torso, which has no place that does not see me, likewise does not impose itself - it exposes itself. It exposes itself by testing whether I will recognize it as a seer. Acknowledging it as a seer essentially means 'believing' in it, where believing, as noted above, refers to the inner operations that are necessary to conceive of the vital principle in the stone as a sender of discrete addressed energies. If I somehow succeed in this, I am also able to take the glow of subjectivity away from the stone. I tentatively accept the way it stands there in exemplary radiance, and receive the starlike eruption of its surplus of authority and soul.

Menno Simon, who lived through these times (1492-1559) and was well qualified to speak, being one of the principal teachers among those who practiced the baptism of believers, wrote: “No one can truly charge me with agreeing with the Münster teaching; on the contrary, for seventeen years, until the present day, I have opposed and striven against it, privately and publicly, by voice and pen. Those who, like the Münster people, refuse the cross of Christ, despise the Lord’s Word, and practice earthly lusts under the pretence of right doing, we never will acknowledge as our brethren and sisters.” “Do our accusers mean to say that because we are outwardly baptized with the same kind of baptism as they, that therefore we must be reckoned as being of the same body and fellowship; then we answer: If outward baptism can do so much, then they themselves may consider what sort of fellowship theirs is, since it is clear and evident that adulterers and murderers and such like have received the same baptism as they!

HDFC Bank was the first of the private lenders to go public— even before it completed a full year. 'It was a mistake,' Deepak told me. The RBI required the new banks to go public within a year but all other lenders went back to the regulator and got extensions. 'We didn't ask for it. We were too naive,' Deepak said. 'Everybody took time as they wanted to get a premium. We sold at par, ₹10. But I have no regrets.' Deepak pushed for a par issue as the bank had nothing to show. And the disaster of parent HDFC's listing was still haunting him, though that had happened a decade and a half ago. In 1978, India's capital market was in a different shape and mortgage was a new product, not understood by many. HDFC put the photograph of its first borrower on the cover of its balance sheet, a D. B. Remedios from Thane, who took a loan of ₹35,000 to build his house. The public issue of HDFC bombed. In an initial public offering (IPO) of ₹10 crore, the face value of one share was ₹100. ICICI, IFC (Washington) and the Aga Khan Fund took 5% stakes each in the mortgage lender and the balance 85% equity was offered to the public, but there were few takers. The stock quoted at a steep discount on listing. For the bank, Deepak did not want to take any chance. So portions of the issue were reserved for the shareholders and employees of HDFC as well as the bank's employees. HDFC decided to own close to a 26% stake in the bank and NatWest 20%. Satpal was offered about 5% and the public 25%. The size of the public issue was ₹50 crore. 'We didn't know whether it would succeed. Our experience with HDFC had been a disaster,' Deepak said. But Deepak had grossly underestimated investors' appetite for the new bank. The issue, which opened on 14 March 1995, was subscribed a record fifty-five times. The stock was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (now known as BSE Ltd) on 26 May that year at ₹39.95, almost at a 300% premium.

As devious as this plot was, it could never have succeeded to the degree that it did had Clinton not abetted it with such vigor. That summer, she failed to emerge as the overwhelming front-runner everyone had expected, weighed down by stories on Clinton Foundation “buckraking” and the revelation that she had kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. She also refused to release transcripts of highly paid speeches she’d delivered to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. In August, e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, had sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in repressive countries such as North Korea and the Republic of the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associated most with his wife was “liar.” Clinton’s tone-deaf response to the steady drip of revelations only deepened their impact because

Don’t let your company default to the kind of numbers that your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is likely to grind out. Instead, look for data that will help you understand whether a specific initiative is succeeding according to the most relevant metrics.

He was a very private man, a true loner, who lacked the instinctive affability and gregariousness of most successful politicians. One thought of him more easily as a strategist than a candidate. He hated meeting ordinary people, shaking their hands, and making small talk with them. He was always awkward at the clubby male bonding of Congress. When he succeeded it was because he worked harder and thought something out more shrewdly than an opponent and, above all, because he was someone who always wanted it more. Nixon had to win. To lose a race meant losing everything—so much was at stake, and it was all so personal. Taft, if not exactly jolly and extroverted, won the admiration of his peers because he was intellectually sterling. Ike inspired other men because of his looks, his athletic ability, his natural charm. Nixon was always the outsider; his television adviser in his successful 1968 presidential campaign, Roger Ailes, once said of him that he had the least control of atmosphere of any politician that Ailes had ever met. By that Ailes meant charisma, the capacity to walk into a room and hold the attention of those assembled there. Even success did not really bring him confidence.

If a platform can create the feeling of community—and FB is nothing if not an ersatz version—then the lack of privacy is fine. Humans will turn over anything to fill the void of loneliness and existential dread, particularly in a world now teeming with it. If the simulacrum can pass as real, it’ll succeed. Ultimately, nobody really cares about privacy, except media elites, underemployed Eurocrats, and zealots who’ve made it a career.* Everyone else would sext you their privates for a fleeting feeling of human connection. And they do.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are re-discoverable by every succeeding generation, its values re-assessed, its meaning re-defined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private China, its patented and copyrighted Hellas.

From studying 50-plus civil wars and revolutions, it became clear that the single most reliable leading indicator of civil war or revolution is bankrupt government finances combined with big wealth gaps. That is because when the government lacks financial power, it can’t financially save those entities in the private sector that the government needs to save to keep the system running (as most governments, led by the United States, did at the end of 2008), it can’t buy what it needs, and it can’t pay people to do what it needs them to do. It is out of power. A classic marker of being in Stage 5 and a leading indicator of the loss of borrowing and spending power, which is one of the triggers for going into Stage 6, is that the government has large deficits that are creating more debt to be sold than buyers other than the government’s own central bank are willing to buy. That leading indicator is turned on when governments that can’t print money have to raise taxes and cut spending, or when those that can print money print a lot of it and buy a lot of government debt.

In 1931, Japan went broke—i.e., it was forced to draw down its gold reserves, abandon the gold standard, and float its currency, which depreciated it so greatly that Japan ran out of buying power. These terrible conditions and large wealth gaps led to fighting between the left and the right. By 1932, there was a massive upsurge in right-wing nationalism and militarism, in the hope that order and economic stability could be forcibly restored. Japan set out to get the natural resources (e.g., oil, iron, coal, and rubber) and human resources (i.e., slave labor) it needed by seizing them from other countries, invading Manchuria in 1931 and spreading out through China and Asia. As with Germany, it could be argued that Japan’s path of military aggression to get needed resources was more cost-effective than relying on classic trading and economic practices. In 1934, there was severe famine in parts of Japan, causing even more political turbulence and reinforcing the right-wing, militaristic, nationalistic, and expansionistic movement. In the years that followed, Japan’s top-down fascist command economy grew stronger, building a military-industrial complex to protect its existing bases in East Asia and northern China and support its excursions into other countries. As was also the case in Germany, while most Japanese companies remained privately held, their production was controlled by the government. What is fascism? Consider the following three big choices that a country has to make when selecting its approach to governance: 1) bottom-up (democratic) or top-down (autocratic) decision making, 2) capitalist or communist (with socialist in the middle) ownership of production, and 3) individualistic (which treats the well-being of the individual with paramount importance) or collectivist (which treats the well-being of the whole with paramount importance). Pick the one from each category that you believe is optimal for your nation’s values and ambitions and you have your preferred approach. Fascism is autocratic, capitalist, and collectivist. Fascists believe that top-down autocratic leadership, in which the government directs the production of privately held companies such that individual gratification is subordinated to national success, is the best way to make the country and its people wealthier and more powerful.

Like many other going-private LBOs, our deal involved significant leverage. But ours had one big difference. If we succeeded in growing Tribune, many people would benefit, including, first and foremost, the employees. The ESOP would enable employees to participate in the upside. The majority of any increase in the value of the company’s stock would accrue to the ESOP and ultimately to employees through their ESOP accounts. So employees would be highly motivated to succeed. That sounded great to me. Everyone would have skin in the game. Including me. It would be the single largest personal investment in my career.

Only after the nation had been herded into suburbs for over a decade were perceptive critics like Lewis Mumford able to see the type of person the housers were trying (and succeeding) to engineer. The suburbs fostered what Mumford called “compulsory mobility,” which was more controlling than the compulsory stability of being forced to live within the medieval city’s walls, because it limited the possibility of human interaction much more dramatically. And without the possibility of contact that is not managed for commercial or other purposes congenial to those who want to control him, man is reduced to the most vulnerable form of individual life and political impotence. The sprawling nature of the suburb was itself a form of control. “Sprawling isolation,” according to Mumford, “has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” than enclosure and close supervision because it dramatically limits the possibility of human interaction and the unpredictable and uncontrollable flow of information that goes with it. Modern forms of social control depend on controlling the flow of information, not on constant supervision. By limiting the options to choosing a Ford over a Chevy or Coke over Pepsi, the people who control the flow of information channel behavior into certain acceptable patterns while at the same time promoting the illusion of freedom of choice. By inhibiting direct contact, the suburb allows information to be “monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals.” As a result, “each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit.*! Here Mumford is articulating, without being specific about it, one of the prime goals of psychological warfare, namely, the prohibition of unauthorized communication among subject peoples. Mumford goes on to say that “this is not . . . the result of a conscious conspiracy by a cunning minority” but his disclaimer is less persuasive than the picture of social control he paints. If, one wonders, this system has not been put into effect by conscious design, how did it get there? Is it possible to have social control without social controllers?

early medieval society, for all its privations, inequities, and deficiencies, was in most ways far more just, charitable, and (ultimately) peaceful than the imperial culture it succeeded, and, immeasurably more peaceful and even more charitable (incredible as this may seem to us) than the society created by the early modern triumph of the nation state.

The actor must not only 'do his job' in a conscientious manner, which is what anyone must do; he must also trap his unconscious (a neat trick) and he must trap it on cue (a neater trick). [...] Should the actor work out the details of his part in personal terms, should he succeed in engaging his own secret anxieties and enjoyments - his private beliefs, his dream-life characteristics, should he then insinuate these secrets into the ebbing and flowing of the play, he will be inevitably swept into the main lines of the action - he will be forced unconsciously from point to point in his performance. The more certainly and firmly these guide ropes have been rigged, the more the actor can afford to forget them and begin to shade his playing. Most observes say to actors, 'How do you remember all those lines?' What a lovely irony, since the actor's most elusive achievement is to forget them! Or, to put it more clearly, to know them so well and to understand their implications so well that he can afford to forget them. Marlon Brando once said, 'I am good when I forget. When I can sit on stage and think of catching a fish. I have just sunk the hook, there's a tug on the line, and at that preoccupied moment, I hear my cue. My God, what is my line? And then I say my line, because the motor memory will save you if you really believe. So I say my line, the line I thought I'd forgotten, and it's good, man. It's really good.' Sounds mysterious, but it isn't. It is merely a neat trick. Catching Pegasus by the heel is a neat trick. It proceeds not from hard labor but from a knowledge of the self. Such knowledge is hard-bought, but it is not like digging ditches. It is a giving-over of the ego. [...]

The actor must not only 'do his job' in a conscientious manner, which is what anyone must do; he must also trap his unconscious (a neat trick) and he must trap it on cue (a neater trick). [...] Should the actor work out the details of his part in personal terms, should he succeed in engaging his own secret anxieties and enjoyments - his private beliefs, his dream-life characteristics, should he then insinuate these secrets into the ebbing and flowing of the play, he will be inevitably swept into the main lines of the action - he will be forced unconsciously from point to point in his performance. The more certainly and firmly these guide ropes have been rigged, the more the actor can afford to forget them and begin to shade his playing. Most observes say to actors, 'How do you remember all those lines?' What a lovely irony, since the actor's most elusive achievement is to forget them! Or, to put it more clearly, to know them so well and to understand their implications so well that he can afford to forget them. Marlon Brando once said, 'I am good when I forget. When I can sit on stage and think of catching a fish. I have just sunk the hook, there's a tug on the line, and at that preoccupied moment, I hear my cue. My God, what is my line? And then I say my line, because the motor memory will save you if you really believe. So I say my line, the line I thought I'd forgotten, and it's good, man. It's really good.' Sounds mysterious, but it isn't. It is merely a neat trick. Catching Pegasus by the heel is a neat trick. It proceeds not from hard labor but from a knowledge of the self. Such knowledge is hard-bought, but it is not like digging ditches. It is a giving-over of the ego.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you is such a man free? I knew one "champion of freedom" who told me himself that, when he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so wretched at the privation that he almost went and betrayed his cause for the sake of getting tobacco again! And such a man says, "I am fighting for the cause of humanity." How can such a one fight? what is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of some action quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it's no wonder that instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead of serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation, as my mysterious visitor and teacher said to me in my youth. And therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? what can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.

But, but…just about every spectacular girl in the world gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to get into pictures. Since only a small percentage succeeded, the town was ridiculously overstocked with ridiculously available young women, all of them working the angles, doing absolutely anything they could to get their moment in the Klieg lights (powerful electric lights, used in filming). Sinatra couldn’t turn a corner without smacking into temptation. He made a $15,000 investment to keep many of such temptations private. With mobster Mickey Cohen he invested in Hollywood Nite Life a weekly gossip magazine run by a low life called Jimmy Tarantino. It was, discreetly, owned by Frank Costello, the boss of the New York Luciano ‘Family’.

At the same time that the Mayor and City Council acted courageously and progressively in ridding the city of those monuments to a loathsome past, the new regime that removal celebrates, as some skeptics note, rests on commitments to policies that intensify economic inequality on a scale that makes New Orleans one of the most unequal cities in the United States. ... Local government contributes to this deepening inequality through such means as cuts to the public sector, privatization of public goods and services, and support of upward redistribution through shifting public resources from service provision to subsidy for private, rent-intensifying redevelopment (commonly but too ambiguously called "gentrification"). These processes, often summarized as neoliberalization, do not target blacks as blacks, and, as in other cities, coincided with the emergence of black public officialdom in and after the elder Landrieu's mayoralty and continued unabated through thirty-two years of black-led local government between two Landrieus and into the black-led administration that succeeded Mitch. Both the processes of neoliberalization and racial integration of the city's governing elite accelerated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It may seem ironic because of how the visual imagery of dispossession and displacement after Katrina came universally to signify the persistence of racial injustice, but a generally unrecognized feature of the post-Katrina political landscape is that the city's governing class is now more seamlessly interracial than ever. That is, or should be, an unsurprising outcome four decades after racial transition in local government and the emergence and consolidation of a strong black political and business class, increasingly well incorporated into the structures of governing. It has been encouraged as well by the city's commitment to cultural and heritage tourism, which, as comes through in Mayor Landrieu's remarks on the monuments, is anchored to a discourse of multiculturalism and diversity. And generational succession has brought to prominence cohorts among black and white elites who increasingly have attended the same schools; lived in the same neighborhoods; participated in the same voluntary associations; and share cultural and consumer tastes, worldviews, and political and economic priorities.

The Modus Operandi of THE REGULUS CONCLAVE as spelled out in 1853! “We hold such and such opinions upon one point only; and that one point is, mutual interest, and under that; 1st, that we can govern this nation; 2d, that to govern it, we must, subvert its institutions; and, 3d, subvert them we will! It is our interest; this is our only bond. Capital must have expansion. This hybrid republicanism saps the power of our great agent by its obstinate competition. We must demoralize the republic. We must make public virtue a by-word and a mockery, and private infamy to be honor. Beginning with the people, through our agents, we shall corrupt the State. “We must pamper superstition, and pension energetic fanaticism—as on ’Change we degrade commercial honor, and make success the idol. We may fairly and reasonably calculate, that within a succeeding generation, even our theoretical schemes of republican subversion may be accomplished, and upon its ruins be erected that noble Oligarchy of caste and wealth for which we all conspire, as affording the only true protection to capital. “Beside these general views, we may in a thousand other ways apply our combined capital to immediate advantage. We may buy up, through our agents, claims upon litigated estates, upon confiscated bonds, mortgages upon embarrassed property, land-claims, Government contracts, that have fallen into weak hands, and all those floating operations, constantly within hail, in which ready-money is eagerly grasped as the equivalent for enormous prospective gains. “In addition, through our monopoly of the manufacturing interest, by a rigorous and impartial system of discipline, we shall soon be able to fill the masses of operators and producers with such distrust of each other, and fear of us, as to disintegrate their radical combinations, and bring them to our feet. Governing on ’Change, we rule in politics; governing in politics, we are the despots in trade; ruling in trade, we subjugate production; production conquered, we domineer over labor. This is the common-sense view of our interests—of the interests of capital, which we represent. In the promotion of this object, we appoint and pension our secret agents, who are everywhere on the lookout for our interests. We arrange correspondence, in cipher, throughout the civilized world; we pension our editors and our reporters; we bribe our legislators, and, last of all, we establish and pay our secret police, local, and travelling, whose business it is, not alone to report to us the conduct of agents already employed, but to find and report to us others, who may be useful in such capacity. “We punish treachery by death!” (from YIEGER'S CABINET or SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM, published 1853)

Perhaps I could help,” Marcus suggested pleasantly, stopping beside her. “If you would tell me what you’re looking for.” “Something romantic. Something with a happy ending. There should always be a happy ending, shouldn’ there?” Marcus reached out to finger a trailing lock of her hair, his thumb sliding along the glowing satin filaments. He had never thought of himself as a particularly tactile man, but it seemed impossible to keep from touching her when she was near. The pleasure he derived from the simplest contact with her set all his nerves alight. “Not always,” he said in reply to her question. Lillian let out a bubbling laugh. “How very English of you. How you all love to suffer, with your stiff…stiff…” She peered at the book in her hands, distracted by the gilt on its cover. “…upper lips,” she finished absently. “We don’t like to suffer.” “Yes, you do. At the very least, you go out of your way to avoid enjoying something.” By now Marcus was becoming accustomed to the unique mixture of lust and amusement that she always managed to arouse in him. “There’s nothing wrong with keeping one’s enjoyments private.” Dropping the book in her hands, Lillian turned to face him. The abruptness of the movement resulted in a sharp wobble, and she swayed back against the shelves even as he moved to steady her with his hands at her waist. Her tip-tilted eyes sparkled like an array of diamonds scattered over brown velvet. “It has nothing to do with privacy,” she informed him. “The truth is that you don’t want to be happy, bec—” She hiccupped gently. “Because it would undermine your dignity. Poor Wes’cliff.” She regarded him compassionately. At the moment, preserving his dignity was the last thing on Marcus’s mind. He grasped the frame of the bookcase on either side of her, encompassing her in the half circle of his arms. As he caught a whiff of her breath, he shook his head and murmured, “Little one…what have you been drinking?” “Oh…” She ducked beneath his arm and careened to the sideboard a few feet away. “I’ll show you…wonderful, wonderful stuff…this.” Triumphantly she plucked a nearly empty brandy bottle from the edge of the sideboard and held it by the neck. “Look what someone did…a pear, right inside! Isn’ that clever?” Bringing the bottle close to her face, she squinted at the imprisoned fruit. “It wasn’ very good at first. But it improved after a while. I suppose it’s an ac”—another delicate hiccup— “acquired taste.” “It appears you’ve succeeded in acquiring it,” Marcus remarked, following her. “You won’ tell anyone, will you?” “No,” he promised gravely. “But I’m afraid they’re going to know regardless. Unless we can sober you in the next two or three hours before they return. Lillian, my angel…how much was in the bottle when you started?” Showing him the bottle, she put her finger a third of the way from the bottom. “It was there when I started. I think. Or maybe there.” She frowned sadly at the bottle. “Now all that’s left is the pear.” She swirled the bottle, making the plump fruit slosh juicily at the bottom. “I want to eat it,” she announced. “It’s not meant to be eaten. It’s only there to infuse the—Lillian, give the damned thing to me.

judges did not force the American government to reveal all, and leave it powerless to punish those who leaked its secrets. Instead they established new rules for the conduct of public debate. They were careful not to allow absolute liberty. Private citizens can sue as easily in America as anywhere else, if writers attack them without good grounds. Poison pens are still punished, and individual reputations are still protected. If, however, a private citizen is engaged in a public debate, it is not enough for him or her to prove that what a writer says is false and defamatory. They must prove that the writer behaved ‘negligently’. The judiciary protects public debates, the Supreme Court said in 1974, because ‘under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges but on the competition of other ideas.’ Finally, the judges showed no regard for the feelings of politicians and other public figures. They must prove that a writer was motivated by ‘actual malice’ before they could succeed in court. The public figure must show that the writer knew that what he or she wrote was a lie, or wrote with a reckless disregard for the truth. Unlike in Britain, the burden of proof was with the accuser, not the accused.

Sustain a positive outlook. Cultivate a can-do spirit, and you will be an inspiration to employees. And, when that's a tall order, fake it until you make it! • Be known as a fair person. Employees want to be treated fairly, and you must take the necessary steps to make sure they feel that is the case. • Keep an eye on morale. Morale at the workplace can be affected positively or negatively by an incident that, although it might seem insignificant to you, might be very important to your employees. A contented group of employees will do more and better work than an unhappy group. • Set an example. If you want your employees to work hard and succeed, then set an example by doing so yourself. Be a spectacular role model! • Take responsibility for your actions. If something goes wrong and it's your fault, step up to the plate and acknowledge whatever it is that went wrong and why. • Maintain your sense of humor. Don't take yourself too seriously, and don't be in such a hurry that you haven't got time to tell or listen to a positive (tasteful) story. Studies suggest laughter and good humor go a long way in helping employees function well in the workplace. • Acknowledge good work through praise. Everyone wants to hear “well done” now and then, so make sure you acknowledge good work. Say it privately and say it within earshot of others, too. • Give credit for ideas. If one of your employees comes up with a great idea, by all means give that person the credit he or she deserves. Don't allow anyone to take an employee's idea and pass it off as his own. (Managers are sometimes accused of stealing an employee's idea; be scrupulous about avoiding even a hint of such a thing.) Beyond the basic guidelines listed above, a good manager must possess other positive qualities: • Understanding: Conventional wisdom dictates that you walk in someone else's shoes before you judge her. Keep that in mind when dealing with people in the workplace. • Good communication skills: Keep your communication skills in good working order. You might want to join speaking organizations to learn how to be a better public speaker. But don't stop there. You communicate when you send a memo, write e-mail, and lead a meeting. There's no such thing as being a “perfect” communicator. An excellent manager will view the pursuit of this art as a work in progress. • Strong listening skills: When was the last time you really listened to someone when he was talking to you? Did you give him your full, undivided attention, or was your mind thinking about five other different things? And when you are listening, do you really know what it is people are trying to tell you? (You might have to ask probing questions in order to get the message.) • Leadership: Employees need good leaders to help guide them, so make sure your leadership skills are enviable and on-duty. • Common sense: You'll need more than your fair share if you expect to be a good manager of people. Some managers toss common sense out the window and then foolishly wonder what happened when things go wrong. • Honesty: Be honest and ethical in all of your business dealings — period! • A desire to encourage: Encouragement is different than praise. Encouragement helps someone who hasn't yet achieved the goal. Employees need your input and encouragement from time to time in order to be successful, so be prepared to fill that role.

Meeting the Marches *Hector March, the Earl March (b.1817) His beloved wife, Charlotte, is deceased. He divides his time between his Sussex estate, Bellmont Abbey, and his London home where he is active in Parliamentary debate, particularly over the question of Irish Home Rule. His hobbies are Shakespearean studies and quarrelling with his hermit. His children are: Frederick, Viscount Bellmont “Monty” (b. 1846) Married to Adelaide Walsingham. Resides in London. Represents Blessingstoke as a Member of Parliament. Lady Olivia Peverell (b.1847) Married to Sir Hastings Peverell. Resides in London where she is a prominent political hostess. Hon. Benedick March (b.1848) Married to Elizabeth Pritchett. Manages the Home Farm at Bellmont Abbey and is acknowledged to be Julia’s favourite brother. His two eldest children, Tarquin and Perdita, make an appearance in two of Lady Julia’s adventures. Lady Beatrice “Bee” Baddesley (b. 1850) Married to Sir Arthur Baddesley, noted Arthurian scholar. Resides in Cornwall. Lady Rupert “Nerissa” Haverford (b.1851) Married to Lord Rupert Haverford, third son of the Duke of Lincoln. Divides her time between London and her father-in-law’s estate near Nottingham. Lady Bettiscombe “Portia” (b.1853) Widow. Mother to Jane the Younger. Resides in London. Hon. Eglamour March (b.1854) Known as Plum to the family. Unmarried. A gifted artist, he resides in London where he engages in a bit of private enquiry work for Nicholas Brisbane. Hon. Lysander March (b.1855) Married to Violanthe, his turbulent Neapolitan bride. He is a composer. Lady Julia Brisbane (b.1856) Widow of Sir Edward Grey. Married to Nicholas Brisbane. Her husband permits her to join him in his work as a private enquiry agent against his better judgment. Hon. Valerius March (b.1862) Unmarried. His desire to qualify as a physician has led to numerous arguments with his father. He pursues his studies in London. *Note regarding titles: as the daughters of an earl, the March sisters are styled “Lady”. This title is retained when one of them marries a baronet, knight, or plain gentleman, as is the case with Olivia, Beatrice, and Julia. As Portia wed a peer, she takes her husband’s title, and as Nerissa married into a ducal family, she takes the style of her husband and is addressed as Lady Rupert. Their eldest brother, Frederick, takes his father’s subsidiary title of Viscount Bellmont as a courtesy title until he succeeds to the earldom. (It should be noted his presence in Parliament is not a perk of this title. Unlike his father who sits in the House of Lords, Bellmont sits in the House of Commons as an elected member.) The younger brothers are given the honorific “The Honourable”, a courtesy which is written but not spoken aloud.

Two very clear indicators are the appearance of lavishly furnished burials and large, elaborate private residences. Skeletons can tell us that one segment of population ate much higher-quality foods and enjoyed better health than the rest. Based on such indicators, we know that large differentials between the rich and powerful few and the rest arose within a few thousand years of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, and the Andes. Somehow a segment of society succeeded in manipulating itself into a position of superiority in these regions; this is a fact accepted by all archaeologists.

HMOs have been so successful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type of HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service private health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ’80s). So even though many people equate HMOs with private health care, these sorts of corporations exist only because of the failure of private markets to supply appropriate health care. HMOs succeed precisely because they are more efficient than insurance markets. There should be no illusions about the character of these organizations—they are giant bureaucracies. The largest of them, Kaiser Permanente, employs over eleven thousand physicians and has more than six million subscribers in the state of California alone. This makes Kaiser larger than most of the government-run health care systems in Canada. And while the Canadian system is extremely decentralized, Kaiser Permanente is a single, vertically integrated corporation.

And then you had to go and sing that song! Why did you pick that song?” His head jerked back slightly and his eyes lost some of their fierceness. “You’re mad about me singing the song? You love that song. You play it all the time.” I finally succeeded at freeing my wrist and crossed my arms under my chest. “And how the hell would you know that? I know I’ve never played that song in front of you!” “Seriously? You leave your windows open! We live right across from each other. I can hear it from my apartment.” Oh. “Well, that’s private. It’s for my parents. You don’t understand what it could possibly mean to me for you to sing that song to me.” Confusion crossed his face and he shook his head. “For your parents?” “Yes! And since we’re throwing the shields out, I lied to you, Kash.” “About what?” he said through gritted teeth, and called my name when I turned and dashed into my room. “Damn it, woman, stop running from me!” “I’m not running. I never told my parents about what happened to me like I promised you I would,” I mumbled as I grabbed underneath my mattress for my journal. Turning back to him, I held it up so he could see it and dropped it on the bed. “That is how I told my parents.” His eyes were narrowed again as they bounced between the journal and me. “Why?” “Why did I lie to you? Because you kept telling me I should tell them. And . . . well . . . technically, I did. I wrote it to them, so I guess I wasn’t exactly lying, because this”—I picked the journal back up—“is the only way I can talk to them.” “What are you—” “They’re gone, Kash. My parents died almost four years ago! I told you I couldn’t tell them. But I wasn’t ready for you to know why; no one in Texas other than Candice knows about it. And that’s how I like it.” Kash’s face fell and he took a few steps closer to me. “Rach . . .” “No, Kash. You didn’t want any more shields. Now there aren’t any. That song you sang tonight, my dad used to sing to my mom when they thought no one was watching. He would pull her close and dance with her in the kitchen while he did it, and it’s my favorite memory of them. So I’m sorry if I didn’t know how to react to you singing it to me, but that song means so much to me.” “Rachel, I’m sorry.” I threw my arms up and planted them on his chest so he wouldn’t come any closer. “Is this what you wanted? You know everything now. Are you happy . . . are you glad the shields are gone?” He pulled me into his arms and held me close. “I had no idea, I’m so sorry. I—I’m just sorry. For hurting you, for pushing you to tell me, for upsetting you with the song . . . all of it. I swear to you that isn’t what I wanted.” My anger was quickly fading and I blinked back tears. “I know, I just . . .” “That song is special to you. I get it, Rach.” He tipped my head back and brushed his lips across my forehead before capturing my eyes with his. “You need to know—” “Rach, I’m back!” Candice called. “Time to start this junk-food night!” Kash didn’t let me go, and I didn’t move. We continued to stare at each other, and when we heard Candice messing with the food in the kitchen, he leaned close and whispered in my ear. “You need to know that you’re special to me. I meant every single word I sang to you tonight and I will never regret that kiss.

The low-trust, family-oriented societies with weak intermediate organizations we have observed have all been characterized by a similar saddle-shaped distribution of enterprises. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Italy, and France have a host of smaller private firms that constitute the entrepreneurial core of their economies and a small number of very large, state-owned firms at the other end of the scale. In such societies, the state plays an important role in promoting large-scale enterprises that might not be spontaneously created by the private sector, albeit at some cost in efficiency. We might postulate then that as a general rule, any society with weak intermediate institutions and low trust outside the family will tend to have a similar distribution of firms in its economy. The Republic of Korea, however, presents an apparent anomaly that needs to be explained in order to preserve the validity of the larger argument. Korea is similar to Japan, Germany, and the United States insofar as it has very large corporations and a highly concentrated industrial structure. On the other hand, Korea is much closer to China than to Japan in terms of family structure. Families occupy a similarly important place in Korea as in China, and there are no Japanese-style mechanisms in Korean culture for bringing outsiders into family groups. Following the Chinese pattern, this should lead to small family businesses and difficulties in institutionalizing the corporate form of organization. The answer to this apparent paradox is the role of the Korean state, which deliberately promoted gigantic conglomerates as a development strategy in the 1960s and 1970s and overcame what would otherwise have been a cultural proclivity for the small- and medium-size enterprises typical of Taiwan. While the Koreans succeeded in creating large companies and zaibatsu in the manner of Japan, they have nonetheless encountered many Chinese-style difficulties in the nature of corporate governance, from management succession to relations on the shop floor. The Korean case shows, however, how a resolute and competent state can shape industrial structure and

The pseudo-private chai pe charcha between Obama and Modi, televised live through carefully placed cameras, drew directly from Simi Garewal’s shows, down to the white sofas. Like those shows, it succeeded in appearing to give the audience a glimpse into the intimate life of the great.

Despite the empire’s problems, however, its former emperor had succeeded in making Byzantium a shining beacon of civilization. The architectural triumph of the Hagia Sophia had only been possible by sophisticated advances in mathematics, and it soon spawned a flourishing school dedicated to improving the field. In Byzantium, primary education was available for both genders, and thanks to the stability of Justinian’s rule, virtually every level of society was literate. Universities throughout the empire continued the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions that were by now over a millennium old, and the works of the great scientists of antiquity were compiled in both public and private libraries. The old western provinces under barbarian rule, by contrast, were quickly sinking into the brutish chaos of the Dark Ages, with recollections of advanced urban life a fading memory. Literacy declined precipitously as the struggle to scratch out an existence made education an unaffordable luxury, and it would have disappeared completely without the church. There, writing was still valued, and remote monasteries managed to keep learning dimly alive. But throughout the West, trade slowed to a crawl, cities shrank, and the grand public buildings fell into disrepair.

If God has called you to be really like Jesus in your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility, and put on you such demands of obedience that He will not allow you to follow other Christians; and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things that He will not let you do. Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires and work schemes to carry out their schemes, but you cannot do it; and if you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent. Others may brag on themselves, on their work, on their success, on their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing; and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works. Others may be allowed to succeed in making money, but it is likely that God will keep you poor, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, and that is a helpless dependence upon Him, that He may have the privilege (the right) of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury. The Lord will let others be honoured and put forward, and keep you hidden away in obscurity, because He wants some choice fragrant fruit for His coming glory which can only be produced in the shade. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit for it, but He will let you work and toil on without knowing how much you are doing; and then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes. The Holy Spirit will put a watch over you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feelings or for wasting your time, over which other Christians never seem distressed. So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has the right to do as He pleases with His own, and He may not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you. He will take you at your word and if you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and let other people say and do many things which He will not let you say or do. Settle it for ever that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing your eyes, in ways that He does not deal with others. Now when you are so possessed with the Living God, that you are in your secret heart pleased and delighted over the peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven. These

The students from the literary section had three written tests: Romanian, French and Latin; the scientific section needed math instead of Latin. Most of us had private tutoring in French and Latin for a few months before the matura. About a third of the candidates failed the written exam. The ones who succeeded took the orals. They were held in a large auditorium, at a high school and were open to the public. Five candidates faced a committee of eight teachers; the head of the committee was a university professor. None of the teachers were from our town. The orals took four to five hours, one group in the morning, another in the afternoon. The results were announced daily, late in the evening.

I wanted a private secretary last year, and I put an ad in the paper under a box number. I bet I got three hundred replies. Almost all of them began something like this: “This is in reply to your ad in Sunday’s Times under Box 299. I wish to apply for the position you offer. I am twenty-six years old, etc. . . .” But one woman was smart. She didn’t talk about what she wanted. She talked about what I wanted. Her letter read like this: “Dear Sir: You will probably get two or three hundred letters in reply to your ad. You are a busy man. You haven’t time to read all of them. So if you will just reach for your telephone right now and call Vanderbilt 3-9512,” or whatever it was, “I’ll be glad to come over and open the letters and throw the worthless ones in the wastebasket and place the others on your desk for your attention. I have had fifteen years experience. . . .” She then went on to tell about the important men she had worked for. The moment I got that letter, I felt like dancing on the table. I immediately picked up the telephone and told her to come over, but I was too late. Some other employer had grabbed her. A woman like that has the business world at her feet. —DALE CARNEGIE

Beneath the explicit acts by which I posit and object out in front of myself, in a definite relation with other objects and with definite characteristics that can be observed, beneath, then, perceptions properly so-called, there is, sustaining them, a deeper function without which perceived objects would lack the mark of reality, as it is missing for the schizophrenic, and by which the objects begin to count or to have value for us. This is the movement that carries us beyond subjectivity, that places us in the world prior to every science and every verification through a sort of 'faith,' or 'primordial opinion'--or that, on the contrary, becomes bogged down in our private appearances. In this domain of originary opinion, hallucinatory illusion is possible even though hallucination is never perception...because here we are still within pre-predicative being, and because the connection between appearance and total experiences is merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception...The world remains the vague place of all experiences. It accommodates, pell-mell, true objects as well as individual and fleeting fantasies--because it is an individual that encompasses everything and not a collection of objects linked together through causal relations. To have hallucinations and, in general, to imagine is to exploit this tolerance of the pre-predicative world as well as our vertiginous proximity to all of being in syncretic experience. Thus, we only succeed in giving an account of the hallucinatory deception by stripping perception of its apodictic certainty and perceptual consciousness of its full self-possession...The perceived is and remains, despite all critical training, beneath the level of doubt and demonstration. The sun 'rises' for the scientist just as much as it does for the uneducated person, and our scientific representations of the solar system remain merely so many rumors, like the lunar landscapes--we never believe in them in the sense in which we believe in the rising of the sun. The rising of the sun, and the perceived in general, is 'real'--we immediately assign it to the world. Each perception, although always potentially 'crossed out' and pushed over to the realm of illusions, only disappears in order to leave a place for another perception that corrects it. Of course, each thing can, apres coup, appear uncertain, but at least it is certain for us that there are things, that is, that there is a world. To wonder if the world is real is to fail to understand what one is saying, since the world is not a sum of things that one could always cast into doubt, but precisely the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn...Correlatively, we must surely deny perceptual consciousness full self-possession and the immanence that would exclude every illusion. If hallucinations are to be possible, consciousness must at some moment cease to know what it does, otherwise it would be conscious of constituting an illusion, it would no longer adhere to it, and there would thus be no more illusion...It is simply necessary that the self-coincidence with myself, such as it is established in the cogito, must never be a real coincidence, and must merely be an intentional and presumptive coincidence. In fact a thickness of duration already intervenes between myself who has just had this thought and myself who thinks that I have just had this thought, and I can always doubt whether that thought, which has already gone by, was really as I currently see it...But my confidence in reflection ultimately comes down to taking up the fact of temporality and the fact of the world as the invariable frame of every illusion and of every disillusion: I only know myself in my inherence in the world and in time; I only know myself in ambiguity.

Despite the implicit warning from one of WeWork’s investors, Adam and Miguel were still dreaming up ways to keep their company private. “We have a lot of fun, and from everything I heard about being a public company, it’s not fun at all,” Miguel said. Perhaps WeWork’s members could own stakes in the company, like a collective, they wondered. Adam continued to believe that the only requirement for WeWork to achieve its ambitions was faith from the investor community. Talking to a reporter from Fast Company, he said that WeNeighborhoods and WeCities were “a when, not an if.” He was far from the first charismatic leader to imagine himself bringing about a better world, and the Fast Company reporter pointed out that pretty much every utopian project in the history of humanity had failed. The kibbutz movement, for one, had shrunk from hundreds of outposts to a few dozen. Adam conceded the point but said that the reporter was missing the crucial difference that made him uniquely situated to lead this particular revolution: “The reason most people did not succeed in this idea before, is that nobody was ever able to write the check.

The prize itself—an elite college admission—comes at a steep price. The cost of a four-year college degree from any of the top-twenty private colleges in the United States now exceeds a quarter of a million dollars, including room, board, books, and fees. The top-twenty public universities cost less, but even they average between $100,000 and $200,000 for a four-year degree, including room, board, books, and fees, depending on one’s state resident status. Society’s desire for early-blooming validation has led to—let’s be honest—price gouging by those official scorekeepers of early achievement, colleges and universities. The rest of us are stuck with big bills and massive debt. Since 1970, college tuition costs have risen three times faster than the rate of inflation. College debt in the United States is now $1.3 trillion, with an 11.5 percent default rate. By all measures, the rush to bloom early has helped create a potential bust bigger than the 2008 housing bubble.

18. The Political Left/Right Cycle. Capitalists (i.e., those of the right) and socialists (i.e., those of the left) don’t just have different self-interests—they have different deep-seated ideological beliefs that they are willing to fight for. The typical perspective of the rightist/capitalist is that self-sufficiency, hard work, productivity, limited government interference, allowing people to keep what they make, and individual choice are morally good and good for society. They also believe that the private sector works better than the public sector, that capitalism works best for most people, and that self-made billionaires are the biggest contributors to society. Capitalists are typically driven crazy by financial supports for people who lack productivity and profitability. To them, making money = being productive = getting what one deserves. They don’t pay much attention to whether the economic machine is producing opportunity and prosperity for most people. They can also overlook the fact that their form of profit making is suboptimal when it comes to achieving the goals of most people. For example, in a purely capitalist system, the provision of excellent public education—which is clearly a leading cause of higher productivity and greater wealth across a society—is not a high priority. The typical perspective of the leftist/socialist is that helping each other, having the government support people, and sharing wealth and opportunity are morally good and good for society. They believe that the private sector is by and large run by capitalists who are greedy, while common workers, such as teachers, firefighters, and laborers, contribute more to society. Socialists and communists tend to focus on dividing the pie well and typically aren’t very good at increasing its size. They favor more government intervention, believing those in government will be fairer than capitalists, who are simply trying to exploit people to make more money. I’ve had exposure to all kinds of economic systems all over the world and have seen why the ability to make money, save it, and put it into capital (i.e., capitalism) is an effective motivator of people and allocator of resources that raises people’s living standards. But capitalism is also a source of wealth and opportunity gaps that are unfair, can be counterproductive, are highly cyclical, and can be destabilizing. In my opinion, the greatest challenge for policy makers is to engineer a capitalist economic system that raises productivity and living standards without worsening inequities and instabilities. 21.

Because spending on the military takes government money away from spending on social programs, and because military technologies go hand in hand with private sector technologies, the biggest military risk for the leading powers is that they lose the economic and technology wars.

Anna had finally succeeded in luring my dear sister out of her room using the aroma of my dear brother’s homemade pancakes,

The realization that everyone is different when you talk to them alone is a secret to success in life. In private you have their full attention. If you talk to two children in front of their mom and then each alone, you hear different things. The mystery for why some people you know succeed or fail in life is how courageous they are in pulling people aside and how effective they are in those private conversations we never see. Only a fool thinks all decisions are made in meetings. To pitch an idea successfully is often possible only in informal, intimate situations. The same goes for speaking the deepest truths and having them heard. Almost no one can convince an entire conference room of coworkers with a speech. That happens only in the movies. Some things are never said, or heard, if more than one pair of ears is listening.

massive transitions to something entirely “new” were always defined in terms of a response to a violent external shock or the threat of one to come. World War II, for example, led to the introduction of cradle-to-grave state welfare systems in most of Europe. So did the Cold War: governments in capitalist countries were so worried by an internal communist rebellion that they put into place a state-led model to forestall it. This system, in which state bureaucrats managed large chunks of the economy, ranging from transportation to energy, stayed in place well into the 1970s. Today the situation is fundamentally different; in the intervening decades (in the Western world) the role of the state has shrunk considerably. This is a situation that is set to change because it is hard to imagine how an exogenous shock of such magnitude as the one inflicted by COVID-19 could be addressed with purely market-based solutions. Already and almost overnight, the coronavirus succeeded in altering perceptions about the complex and delicate balance between the private and public realms in favour of the latter. It has revealed that social insurance is efficient and that offloading an ever-greater deal of responsibilities (like health and education) to individuals and the markets may not be in the best interest of society.

there were several SQUIREENS, or little squires; a race of men who have succeeded to the BUCKEENS, described by Young and Crumpe. SQUIREENS are persons who, with good long leases, or valuable farms , possess incomes from three to eight hundred a year; who keep a pack of hounds; TAKE OUT a commission of the peace, sometimes before they can spell (as her ladyship said), and almost always before they know anything of law or justice! Busy and loud about small matters; JOBBERS AT ASSIZES , combining with one another, and trying upon every occasion, public or private, to push themselves forward, to the annoyance of their superiors, and the terror of those below them. In the usual course of things, these men are not often to be found in the society of gentry; except , perhaps, among those gentlemen or noblemen who like to see hangers-on at their tables; or who find it for their convenience to have underling magistrates, to protect their favourites , or to propose and CARRY jobs for them on grand juries. At election times, however, these persons rise into sudden importance with all who have views upon the county.

AMANDA: We're being so bad, so terribly bad, we'll suffer for this, I know we shall. ELYOT: Can't be helped. AMANDA: Starting all those awful rows all over again. ELYOT: No, no, we're older and wiser now. AMANDA: What difference does that make? The first moment either of us gets a bit nervy, off we'll go again. ELYOT: Stop shilly-shallying, Amanda. AMANDA: I'm trying to be sensible. ELYOT: You're only succeeding in being completely idiotic. AMANDA: Idiotic indeed! What about you? ELYOT: Now look here Amanda AMANDA[stricken]: Oh my God! ELYOT [rushing to her and kissing her]: Darling, darling, I didn't mean it. AMANDA: I won't move from here unless we have a compact, a sacred, sacred compact never to quarrel again. ELYOT: Easy to make but difficult to keep. AMANDA: No, no, it's the bickering that always starts it. The moment we notice we're bickering, either of us, we must promise on our honor to stop dead. We'll invent some phrase or catchword, which when either of us says it, automatically cuts off all conversation for at least five minutes. ELYOT: Two minutes dear, with an option of renewal. AMANDA: Very well, what shall it be? ELYOT [hurriedly]: Solomon Isaacs. AMANDA: All right, that'll do. ELYOT: Come on, come on. AMANDA: What shall we do if we meet either of them on the way downstairs? ELYOT: Run like stags. AMANDA: What about clothes? ELYOT: I've got a couple of bags I haven't unpacked yet. AMANDA: I've got a small trunk. ELYOT: Send the porter up for it. AMANDA: Oh this is terrible - terrible - ELYOT: Come on, come on, don't waste time. AMANDA: Oughtn't we to leave notes or something? ELYOT: No, no, no, we'll telegraph from somewhere on the road. AMANDA: Darling, I daren't, it's too wicked of us, I simply daren't. ELYOT [seizing her in his arms and kissing her violently]: Now will you behave? AMANDA: Yes, but Elyot darling - ELYOT: Solomon Isaacs!

PERSONAL IDENTITY AUDIT How do you think the world views you? How do you view yourself? How is the “public you” different from the “private you”? What conditions produce the BEST VERSION OF YOU? (The version of you who competes and gets the highest results.) Competition Fear of loss A setback A victory Having someone believe in you A point to prove Name a ninety-day period of your career during which you were the hungriest to succeed. What drove you? How do you handle a public loss? Do you feel you’re entitled to things without earning them? How difficult a personality do you have? Do you have a tendency of blaming others for your lack of effort or discipline? If yes, why? Very difficult Difficult Somewhat difficult Easygoing Very easygoing Do you get along with people like yourself or can there be only one of you in the room? Who do you speak to the most when you’re losing? People ahead of you People at the same level as you People not yet at your level No one Who are you secretly envious of that no one knows about?Don’t worry about writing this one down. No one will know youranswer but you. How is your relationship with the person you’remost envious of? How much of that envy is due to your not willing to do the work that the other individual is willing to do? What type of people annoy you the most and why? What type of people do you like the most and why? Who do you collaborate with the most? What qualities and traits do you admire most in others? How do you handle pressure? How often do you challenge your own vision to help improve your perspective? What brings out the worst side of you? Why? What brings out the best side of you? Why? What do you value the most in business and in life? What do you fear the most in your line of business? What accomplishment are you most proud of and why? Who do you want to be? What kind of life do you want to live?

Which brings me to a question I ask myself every day: What kind of a father have I been? Have I been good? Have I helped more than I have hurt? Have I given as much as I have taken? In truth, my children have, at times, had trouble. With depression, with drugs, with all those exotic things that befall kids nowadays. Though I do not like all the things they have done, I am here for them when they are in jeopardy and I do whatever I can when they need help. I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem is in our very circumstances, if the life we have given our children—the money and the cars and the vacations and the private planes—has spoiled the everyday world for them. Can the child of a rich man have the same ambition as a kid from the Bronx? One evening, one of my daughters, having just flown on a commercial plane for the first time in her life, called me in a panic. “My God,” she said, “the way they jam you in, and make you sit there, in one seat, it’s like a prison!” In the end, though, I think your outlook has less to do with money than with the values your parents exhibit and your own nature. In this, I’ve been neither perfect nor blameless. I love my children and I think I have been a good father, but there were times when I chose my career over the life of the house. Was I there for every recital, or play, or concert? No, I was working. It’s nearly impossible to succeed in the world and also succeed in the house, which means, at some level, even if you do not realize it, you make a choice. This is a regret. I wish I had been there more, had done better, had given my children as much as my parents gave me. I did not. I was always divided, being pulled away, on the phone, and so forth. But maybe you do best by

Where did he find the determination—the willpower—to climb from a housing project to a private jet? “I don’t really know,” he told me. “My mom always said, ‘You’re going to be the first person to go to college, you’re going to be a professional, you’re going to make us all proud.’ She would ask these little questions, ‘How are you going to study tonight? What are you going to do tomorrow? How do you know you’re ready for your test?’ It trained me to set goals. “I’ve been really lucky,” he said. “And I really, genuinely believe that if you tell people that they have what it takes to succeed, they’ll prove you right.

In a preemptive strike, the lead director asked each director privately to identify one step or action that the chief executive ought to take in the next twelve months to best set the company up for recovery and then success. After compiling the directors’ proposals on a single sheet of paper and appending his own suggestions, the lead director circulated the draft among all the directors for comment or change. Once the document was finalized, the lead director then met the chief executive in a neutral city to present the directors’ specific ideas for action. The director explained to the CEO that the board’s idea list was intended to help him succeed, not to pester him with gratuitous criticism or demand tactical changes. The lead director added that his personal intervention came with the blessing of every member of the board, and he asked the CEO to report his progress in meeting the directors’ recommendations to all board meetings during the coming year.

I used to firmly believe that prestigious schools, which encompasses both private schools and top-tier quantile 5 public schools with impressive graduation rates, held a clear advantage over lower-quality no fee public schools. That was, until Dr Thomas Sowell introduced me to the sorting function of the formal schooling system and the unfair advantage prestigious schools have since they can pick and choose who they admit. From the outset they can choose to admit students of a certain intellect thus increasing the chances of these students performing favourably relative to no fee public schools that have an obligation to admit everyone. Parents who can afford to send their child to private school are usually more involved and provide more resources for their child to succeed. The ability of parents to afford the prohibitively high costs of the schools is also an indicator of the child’s abilities since his parents had it in them to work hard enough to earn what enabled to afford a prestigious school. Once you have factored those aspects as a minimum, the prestigious school’s performance doesn’t seem that great. As long as the parents have resources to support the child’s learning environment, the type of school a child attends becomes less relevant. This is why the quantile 5 public schools perform at the level of private schools. As the level of the parent’s material wealth increases such that more educational resources can be availed to the child, so does the performance of a child. This, off course happens to a certain level as the law of diminishing return eventually kicks in.

The Capital Markets Cycle of the Dutch The Dutch invented capitalism as we know it. This was great for the Dutch and great for the world, but like most great inventions, it brought with it some potentially deadly consequences. While production, trade, and private ownership had existed before, the ability of large numbers of people to collectively buy ownership in money-making endeavors through public equity markets did not exist. The Dutch created that when they invented the world’s first publicly listed company (the Dutch East India Company) and the first stock exchange in 1602.

She raised her children, all of them. She raised them, nurtured them, watched them love or hate or succeed or fail, gave each of them her private excesses of possibilities, observed, sometimes from afar, what they did with them, watched her own ideas wither or grow. Then she finally watched her children die, and she was jealous.

-What is the mind’s physical reaction to the injection process? – Sometimes its reaction is by making a feeling of headache and numbness in the head, or the desire to sleep, confusion, and of course the memories, but we cannot rely on them. Even if it was not subjected to an injection. In any case, the successful injection process must be done without the mind knowing, and pass without being aware of it. -How many failed brainwashing have you done? -Zero. -How many successful operations? -Zero. A long moment of silence. The psychiatrist looked into his eyes! She knows that he succeeded in all his operations! Unexpected answer. -Why do you say that you failed in all operations? -I did not say that I failed, I said that I succeeded in zero operations -What is the difference? – They are all still alive, as far as I know, the operation is done, but I do not know which of them might discover the trick at the last moment of my life. – Anything new in your private life? women? Friends maybe? -No, they are all superficial relationships, except for Katrina -Why do you refuse to let someone close into your life? -They ask a lot, and I do not like to give answers, you are an exception, of course -What is on your mind the most right now? -Do things happen because I think of them, or do I think of them because they will happen? -Why? -Because for a week I have been thinking that you will come to meet me, did my thoughts bring you here, or did I somehow sense your presence? -What is the Sixth Sense? -It does not exist, our five senses receive an enormous number of notes, and details daily, our conscious mind cannot prevent their reception, but it can ignore them, stores them very far away without alerting us to them, to relieve itself from the trouble of dealing with them, and when we feel that something is going to happen, it is caused by it. Our subconscious mind analyzes and elicits billions of billions of details stored in it, giving us the result in the form of a feeling, to be able to transcend the power of our conscious mind, we have to take these feelings seriously and force our conscious mind to explain their cause, and return to memory and prove it. -What are the conscious mind and the subconscious mind? -The names are incorrect, but they are customary to call them like this. I prefer to call the conscious mind the mechanical mind or the brain, and the subconscious mind with consciousness, for the brain is nothing but a mechanical machine, while the subconscious mind, in fact, is consciousness itself, perhaps the soul. -Why do you talk about the brain, the subconscious mind, the soul, and you, as if you are different entities from each other? – I do not believe that I am this body, I am something inside it, perhaps I am condemned from another world to imprisonment in it, as a punishment for a sin I committed there, and perhaps with my death, my sentence ends. -So, you see that you are something different from spirit and consciousness? -No, we are all one, we cannot be separated, I am the soul, and the subconscious mind is consciousness, and it is mine, while the brain is the property of the body, or the body is its property. -What is the most frightening thing about death? – Everyone lies, the religious, and the non-religious, they all lie about their greatest fear of death, Muslims fear Hell and its torment, this is true, but if their choice is between eternity in Hell under torment, or total annihilation, nothing, they will choose the first option. That what frightens us most in Death is complete unconsciousness, becoming nothing, as if we did not exist, simply disappearing and having no awareness, any sense of anything, forever. -Why would you choose torment over annihilation? -Because I will somehow adapt to it, we humans are able to adapt in all circumstances, and always have enough hope to be patient with them.

A bank that can’t deliver enough hard money to meet the claims being made on it is in trouble whether it is a private bank or a central bank, though central banks have more options than private banks. That’s because a private bank can’t print the money or change the laws to make it easier to pay their debts, while some central banks can. Private banks must either default or get bailed out by the government when they get into trouble, while central banks can devalue their claims (e.g., pay back 50–70 percent) if their debts are denominated in their national currency. If the debt is denominated in a currency that they can’t print, then they too must ultimately default.

Like all best supporting actors, the state may also step centre stage, taking entrepreneurial risks where the market and commons can’t or won’t reach. The extraordinary success of tech companies such as Apple is sometimes held up as evidence of the market’s dynamism. But Mariana Mazzucato, an expert in the economics of government-led innovation, points out that the basic research behind every innovation that makes a smart phone ‘smart’—GPS, microchips, touchscreens and the Internet itself—was funded by the US government. The state, not the market, turns out to have been the innovating, risk-taking partner, not ‘crowding out’ but ‘dynamising in’ private enterprise—and this trend holds across other high-tech industries too, such as pharmaceuticals and biotech.42 In the words of Ha-Joon Chang, ‘If we remain blinded by the free market ideology that tells us only winner-picking by the private sector can succeed, we will end up ignoring a huge range of possibilities for economic development through public leadership or public-private joint efforts.