Steven Lessard

“I don’t judge him now. Like most of us, he wasn’t what he thought he was. But thankfully, for most of us, comprehension of the disparity between who we think we are and who we truly are comes gradually and with age. We are lucky to avoid a sudden tear in our self-image and suffer more easily its slow degradation. For Leftwich the apparent union between personality and character ruptured like the fuselage of the early De Havilland Comet, in an instant, in midair, unable to withstand the mismatch between external and internal pressure. How do you ever forgive yourself for a betrayal like that? But we have all committed acts that surprise us and are hard to forgive. You can count yourself lucky if your model of yourself survives its collision with time.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

“In life there isn’t always such an easy resolution. One has to treat people as responsible for their actions, and yet also recognize that they can’t help what they do. It’s always easier to regard others from the outside. But one can also try to imagine them as they experience themselves, as we all do, from the inside. Then it becomes possible to see that we all deserve mercy.”
― Emanuel Derman, Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life

“The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him.

Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors ). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).

Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.”
― Ryszard Kapuscinski “The Shadow of the Sun”

“I took it, though, as an evil omen that the deck wasn’t cutting in our favor, and then was certain of it when the notorious Iraqi exile and convicted swindler Ahmed Chalabi charged onto the stage. Frankly, Chalabi was the last thing I needed. A University of Chicago and MIT grad, Chalabi had been convicted in Jordan for bank embezzlement. Resurrected by the CIA after the Gulf War, he now owed his political existence to Washington. It was our F-16s that kept Saddam from grabbing and lynching him; it was the United States he ran to when things got ugly. By rights, Chalabi should have been America’s obedient proxy who slavishly followed my orders. Instead, he treated me as if I were the mad uncle in the attic. He would pretend to listen to me, but as soon as I was out the door, he’d revert to his old conniving self.”
― Robert B. Baer, The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins