Steven Lessard

“I'll give you three pieces of advice: never make fun of a millionaire, never hit a cripple, and never have sex with an idiot.”
― Ace Greenberg, The Risk and Fall of Bear Sterns

“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”

“While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us, through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
― Charlie Munger, "Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger"

“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