Stijn F.

“In dealing with his frustrations of an unpredictable environment typical of the startup world, Kaplan wrote that an entrepreneur is “faced with an endless stream of arbitrary challenges that bear down on you with the relentlessness of an automatic pitching machine. The trick is to know when to swing and when to duck.” [29]”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet

“The greatest part of the tragedy is that there was actually plenty of food in Ireland itself. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

“In 1958 AT&T, the owner of Bell Labs, was served with an antitrust court order that forbade it to ever enter the computer business and that forced it to license any non-telephone inventions to the whole world. This odd ruling turned Unix into a worldwide phenomenon, as it spread from one corner of the computer world to the other.”
― Arun Rao, A History of Silicon Valley: The Greatest Creation of Wealth in the History of the Planet

“To choose wisely, we must unlearn much of the history we have been taught. Many of us learned a version of our history as one of inevitable progress, goodness, and triumph. Many of us learned the inverted version, that our history is one of inevitable sin, racism, conquest, greed. Neither of these is true, because both versions airbrush out our own free will. The truth is, America is a battle, a struggle for justice. And we choose, every generation, who wins.”
― Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy