Andrew

“Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism – without the splendor.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“Why bother hiring a hotshot if the bulk of their time is spent doing administrative work?”
― Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

“Properly speaking the artist, the writer, and the scientist should be moved by such an irresistible impulse to create that, even if they were not being paid for their work, they would be willing to pay to get the chance to do it. However, we are in a period in which forms have largely superseded educational content, and one which is moving toward an ever-increasing thinness of educational contents. It is now considered, perhaps more a matter of social prestige to obtain a higher degree and follow what may be regarded as a cultural career, than a matter of any deep impulse.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society

“It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street