Spencer Claiborne

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“She could envision the opposite of the UpPaying trend making its way toward all of them: a movement in which people paid a premium for more contact, not less.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“Consider these numbers from noted British economic historian Angus Maddison: In the fourteenth century, the typical Chinese person made a tad bit more than his or her Western European counterpart—annual income per person totaled $600 in China, compared with $560 in Europe. But then Europe grew and China stood still. China’s income fell to two-thirds of the European standard by 1700, and then it cratered. By 1900, the median Chinese person earned $545 annually—in dollar terms, almost unchanged from six centuries prior—compared with $3,000 in Germany and more than $4,000 in England and the United States. Industrialization and its benefits were passing China by.”
― Scott Tong, A Village with My Name: A Family History of China's Opening to the World

“The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer