Eden Clovis > Eden's Quotes

“The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“From what I've witness, honesty didn't really make anyone happy. The truth was a punch to the gut, and while you were falling, a knee to the face, then you could lie on the floor and bleed for a spell.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade

“the Norwegians of Chicago were widely regarded as a frugal, industrious, and upstanding people, who enhanced the moral character of the metropolis.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any," writes Solzhenitsyn. "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law." This is the foundation of the Dream -- its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is some passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, we're not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily.

Para-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Tamparika Comanches”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“Prisons are full of sociopaths and psychopaths, but when questioned, the imprisoned sociopath will honestly admit that they will commit any number of crimes to help a friend.

A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move a body.

A friend will bail you out of jail; a true friend will be sitting beside you.

Who wouldn’t want to have a true friend? But they sound a lot like a sociopath.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade

“the Weeping Willow love slayer,”
― Harold Schechter, The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation

“great leaders are (1) people of integrity and decency; (2) confident enough to be humble; (3) both kind and tough; (4) transparent; and (5) aware that we all seek meaning in work. We would also teach them that (6) what they say is important, but what they do is far more important, because their people are always watching them. In short, we would demand and develop ethical leaders.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I am just thankful that I knew her at all. If we had not met, or if we had met and just passed each other by, all the great literature of the world, all the poets, all the great love stories would have been meaningless to me. You cannot understand what you have not experienced.”
― Jennifer Worth

“The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move a body. A friend will bail you out of jail; a true friend will be sitting beside you. Who”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: a con artist's masquerade

“of”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“He explained that he talks about death "all the time" with his friends. They ask each other, "Hey, what you want when you die?"

Luciano asked, "Don't people say that where you come from?"

It was hard to explain that, no, for the most part, they really don't.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Customer: I'm looking for a book for my son. He's six.
Bookseller: How about this one - it's about-
Customer: Yeah, whatever, I'll take it.”
― Jen Campbell, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

“One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“Lincoln was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

“Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of "Bam" (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with "butyric" - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“All this is the carpet of life. You are sitting on it. Each of those knots represents one plant or animal. They, and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our groceries are not manufactured. They are produced by what we call nature. This rug represents that nature. If something happens in Asia or Africa and a cheetah disappears, that is one knot from the carpet. If you understand that, you’ll realize that we are living on a very limited number of species and resources, on which our life depends.” In”
― Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War