Tyler > Tyler's Quotes

“But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power

“The relationship between the people and their government troubled her. The government was the mission of an entire society: why was the society undermining it? “I’m routinely appalled by how profoundly ignorant even highly educated people are when it comes to the structure and function of our government,” she said. “The sense of identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a ‘collective good’ sense.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“(Post Katrina) . . . He was reminded of the first time he'd run on a track with spikes. "You just fly on the track." The poor kids he saw in New Orleans were trying to run the same race in life that he was. But he was wearing spikes and they weren't. "There's a real idealism that you have to indulge to think that people in New Orleans were now going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There were no bootstraps.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

“There is another way to think of John MacWilliams’s fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“fifth risk: the risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. “Program management” is not just program management. “Program management” is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“the risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“All good inventions come from something personal,” she said. “People create things because it’s personal.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

“Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just. At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Don't you see that Americans need the anti-American? While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also better to be hated than ignored.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Dare I admit it? Dare I confess? America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“However, displayed right alongside all the Confederate flag paraphernalia is a bunch of American flag merch – American flag place mats, patriotic “body crystals,” flag stickers you attach to your skin. Personally, I’m small-minded and literal enough that I see the two symbols as contradictory, especially in a time of war. But I fear that the consumer who buys a Confederate flag coffee cup, which she will then put on her American flag place mat, is the sort of sophisticated thinker who is open-minded enough that she is capable of hating blacks and Arabs at the same time.”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren”
― Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“ ‘Forget about what you are escaping from,’ ” he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum’s. “ ‘Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.’ ”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.”
― Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“Deep in their rat tendons, rats know history.”
― Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habits of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

“Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“Prejudice and private interest will be antagonists too powerful for public spirit and public good.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“From the summer of 1909 to the end of 1911, New York waist makers - young immigrants, mostly women - achieved something profound. They were a catalyst for the forces of change: the drive for women's rights (and other civil rights), the rise of unions, and the use of activist government to address social problems.”
― David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

“The young immigrants in the garment factories, alight with a spirit of progress, impatient with the weight of tradition, hungry for improvement in a new land and a new century, organized themselves to demand a more fair and humane society.”
― David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, 仁者无敌：林肯的政治天才