Timothy Volpert

“At the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, where they’ve knowingly mispriced risk, one guy messages another: ‘Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,’ adding the emoticon ‘:O)’.”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“But why, if the real weekly value of my labour is thirty hours of other people’s work, would I ever work sixty hours?”
― Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

“We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us.”
― Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

“What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America