Tom Wright > Quotes

“The country’s best minds increasingly were leaving, preferring a life in New York or London over the struggles in Malaysia. It was the kind of brain drain that had stunted the growth of nations from India to Indonesia, whose most ambitious citizens gave up on their troubled homeland and sought a better life elsewhere.”
― Tom Wright, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

“Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and re-imagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.”
― Tom Wright, Paul: A Biography

“Never seek outside myself Or I will be far from me. Now I go only by myself. Everywhere I meet my reflection— Now, he is surely me, But I am not him. Seeing in this way I will act in accord with whatever comes.”
― Tom Wright, Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary

“Quizá también se deba a que la facilidad de comprar en línea abre el mercado de las drogas a una nueva gama de clientes. Hasta ahora, tratar de conseguir drogas ha sido difícil y a menudo desagradable, pues se requiere una red de contactos poco fiables o realizar una angustiosa excursión a un callejón oscuro. Comprar en línea lo hace más fácil y le otorga una cara casi respetable a un negocio sucio.”
― Tom Wright, Narconomics: Cómo administrar un cartel de la droga

“In late April, as Goldman prepared 1MDB’s first bond issue, some one hundred thousand anticorruption protesters poured out into the streets of Kuala Lumpur. From the sky, the city center was awashed in yellow—the color of the demonstrator’s T-shirts.”
― Tom Wright, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

“Since uji is moment-by-moment time of all-inclusive jiko—self and all worlds—it’s enough just to return to the fundamental reality of our life. In doing so, jiko—whole self inclusive of all worlds—returns concretely, moment-by-moment to all-inclusive jiko. This concrete returning is the meaning of “thoroughly penetrating.”
― Tom Wright, Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary

“I’m going to repeat myself again: jiko—all-inclusive self—is wholly one. That is one/one, two/two, all/all. Jiko is born as wholly one. This wholly one is not simply one human being among all humanity, nor merely one member among all the members of a society—some sort of cog in a wheel. Everything that is seen or heard or felt—everything—forms the content of jiko that is all/all. At the same time, this is also all times/all times. It is the life of all/all, all times / all times that we are actually living out.”
― Tom Wright, Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary

“But as long as we think we were born, we will die. Grasped by thoughts, people usually think only of living and put a lid on dying in order not to see it; they don’t understand true life. When we uncover the lid and see that life includes death, we can see true life clearly. As the reality of life, we are born and die within the total, interpenetrating self that has no birth and death. This is mahā—great, boundless vastness.”
― Tom Wright, Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary

“Goldman colleagues noticed how Leissner had an uncanny ability to make clients feel like they had a deep, personal connection with him. He was a relationship banker, skilled at reeling in important executives through a kind of personal magnetesim, rather than a "structuring guy", one of the mathematical whizzes who priced and sold complex derivative products. p55”
― Tom Wright, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

“As Low amassed his art collection, he paid no heed to the 60 percent of Malaysian households who lived on less than $1,600 a month.”
― Tom Wright, Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

“I stood, and suddenly the stark solitude and my own vulnerability hit me fully.”
― Tom Wright, Dead Reckoning

“Prime Minister Najib’s father, himself a leader, but of another era, had envisioned Malaysia as a proud democracy. The success of Low’s scheme highlighted just how far the nation had strayed from that dream.”
― Tom Wright

“Actually, the best answer I’ve heard in the last few weeks has not been to the question ‘Why?’ It’s been to the question, ‘What?’ What can we do?”
― Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath