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127 books
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105 voters
“What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
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“President Eisenhower, like many Americans, is a very fervent believer in a very vague religion.”
― One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
― One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
“Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.”
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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
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“On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football: a benign, if silly, facsimile of investing. Alas, there was a difference between fantasy football and fantasy finance: When a fantasy football player drafts Peyton Manning to be on his team, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning. When Mike Burry bought a credit default swap based on a Long Beach Savings subprime–backed bond, he enabled Goldman Sachs to create another bond identical to the original in every respect but one: There were no actual home loans or home buyers. Only the gains and losses from the side bet on the bonds were real.”
― The Big Short
― The Big Short
The History Book Club
— 25633 members
— last activity Nov 20, 2025 01:44PM
"Interested in history - then you have found the right group". The History Book Club is the largest history and nonfiction group on Goodread ...more
The Cold War
— 99 members
— last activity Jul 22, 2020 09:21AM
Cold War history, from Harry Truman and Robert Oppenheimer to Ronald Reagan the fall of the Berlin Wall. Soldiers, spies, industrialists, academics, p ...more
James’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at James’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
952 books
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81 friends
69 books
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41 friends
1,893 books
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32 friends
3,021 books
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105 friends
2,456 books
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436 friends
1,377 books
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561 friends
1,385 books
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155 friends
2,583 books
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14 friends
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