Brendan

“Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in early industrial societies organized, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

“The atmosphere in the hall is electric with anticipation, as it might be for Bruce Springsteen at a sold-out concert or at a public appearance at Buckingham Palace by the queen of England. Indeed, this hall is also packed with breathless and enthusiastic devotees. But the star the audience is waiting for is not a musician or a queen, but a simple-living, elderly rabbi—the Rebbe or grand rabbi of the exclusively Hasidic village of New Square, New York. And what he will do is not entertain but simply light a Chanukah menorah.”
― Joseph Berger, The Pious Ones

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“The dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII and the subsequent reorganization of agriculture was another step that altered the balance of power in rural England. The slow growth in the real incomes of the English peasantry before the beginning of the industrial era was a consequence of this type of drift.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity