Broderick

“He saw an evening when he sat slumped across his desk in that office. It was late and his staff had left; so he could lie there alone, unwitnessed. He was tired. It was as if he had run a race against his own body, and all the exhaustion of years, which he refused to acknowledge, had caught him at once and flattened him against the desk top. He felt nothing, except the desire not to move. He did not have the strength to feel--not even to suffer. He had burned everything there was to burn within him; he had scattered so many sparks to start so many things--and he wondered whether someone could give him now the spark he needed, now when he felt unable ever to rise again. He asked himself who had started him and kept him going. Then he raised his head. Slowly, with the greatest effort of his life, he made his body rise until he was able to sit upright with only one hand pressed to the desk and a trembling arm to support him. He never asked that question again.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The basic trouble with the modern world … is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is forced upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Love Poem
ـــــــــ
It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don't love them
any more.”
― Richard Brautigan

“Through the way it values - or does not - the finite resources of our planet, double entry [accounting] now has the potential to make or break life on the earth. We can continue to ignore the free gifts of nature in the accounts of our nations and corporations, and thereby continue to ruin the planet. Or we can begin to account for nature and make it thrive again. If numbers and money are the only language spoken in the global capitalist economy, then this is the language we must use. Accountants, remodelled as eco-accountants, can plan a central role in this conversation - and it is for this reason that Jonathan Watts wrote in 2010 that they may be the one last hope for life on earth. As he also pointed out, done badly, eco-accounting will mean the natural world is further 'commodified, priced, sliced and sold to the highest bidder'. But done well, it could reframe our values and transform the capitalist world in ways we are yet to imagine.”
― Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World