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MSA is Currently Reading

MSA is currently reading

The End of History and the Last Man

by Francis Fukuyama

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Aug 11, 2026 04:38AM

MSA’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis

32 highlights

A few years out of law school he’d met a financier named Sam Heyman, who was as disturbed as Max was by how uninterested talented young people were in government work. Max persuaded Heyman to set aside $25 million for him so that he might ...more

See MSA’s 3 books with notes and highlights…

MSA’s Quotes

“If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter.”
― Anchee Min, Red Azalea: A Memoir

tags: fighting, mother, womb

1150 likes

“I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom?”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

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“I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present

8 likes

“At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

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“Religion is based primarily upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly as the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

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