Jac

“Swedes don't like to ask favors of each other: they keep their problems to themselves and suffer in silence. Being duktig is one facet of this: if you are duktig then you don't need any help, and as duktighet is the ultimate ideal for Swedes; to ask for help - or even to give it - is a kind of low-level social taboo.”
― Michael Booth

“The Swedish system is best understood not in terms of socialism, but in terms of Rousseau," he continued. "Rousseau was an extreme egalitarian and he really hated any kind of dependence--depending on other people destroyed your integrity, your authenticity-- therefore the ideal situation was one where every citizen was an atom separated from all the other atoms.... The Swedish system's logic is that it is dangerous to be dependent on other people, to be beholden to other people. Even to your family.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.”
― Mark Twain, Roughing It

“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will *have* to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them - if the people you go among suffer by the operation.”
― Mark Twain, Roughing It