Jonathan Leblang

“was a book by Arthur Raistrick called Quakers in Science and Industry and I glanced through it for a few minutes, then carried it to a nearby chair and sat reading for about half an hour, so unexpectedly absorbed did I become. I hadn’t realized it, but Quakers in the Darbys’ day were a bullied and downtrodden minority in Britain. Excluded from conventional pursuits like politics and academia, they became big in industry and commerce, particularly, for some reason, in banking and the manufacture of chocolate. The Barclays and Lloyds banking families and the Cadburys, Frys, and Rowntrees of chocolate renown were all Quakers. They and many others made Britain a more dynamic and wealthy place entirely as a consequence of being treated shabbily by it. It had never occurred to me to be unkind to a Quaker, but if that’s what it takes to get the country back on its feet again, I am prepared to consider it. —”
― Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island

“Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can’t improve on duct tape.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation.”
― Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

“Another State Department representative noted that the central government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan public, the lowest in 10 years, according to polling done in the country. He observed that the illicit economy, opium and illegal mining, was the size of the regular economy, and a significant portion was under control of Taliban insurgents.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House