Michael Collins

“humans still die in the tens of thousands from the disease every year (fifty-five thousand, in the estimate of the World Health Organization).”
― Bill Wasik, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

“When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. MENG TZU (MENCIUS), fourth century BCE”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Since the end of the twentieth century, the United States has witnessed an ominous and growing divergence among three trends that should ordinarily move together: wealth, output, and employment.”
― Nicholas Eberstadt, Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition

“How big is the “men without work” problem today? Consider a single fact: in 2015, the work rate (or employment-to-population ratio) for American males ages twenty-five–to–fifty-four was slightly lower than it had been in 1940, which was at the tail end of the Great Depression.”
― Nicholas Eberstadt, Men without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition