Josh M.

“Remorse is alien to me. I have a penchant for deceit. I am generally free of entangling and irrational emotions. I am strategic and canny, intelligent and confident…. Yet I am not motivated or constrained by the same things that most good people are…. [As a child], I envisioned the people in my life as robots that turned off when I wasn’t directly interacting with them…. I have never killed anyone, but I have certainly wanted to. I may have a disorder, but I am not crazy. In a world filled with gloomy, mediocre nothings populating a go-nowhere rat race, people are attracted to my exceptionalism like moths to a flame.142”
― Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy

“By the end of the ninth century, such men appeared to have adopted a new term for themselves that played both upon their wish to be seen as loyal retainers of the central court and on the court’s desire to regard them as mere hirelings. They called themselves “those who serve”—the samurai.”
― Jonathan Clements, A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun