Jamie Smith

“Melancholy is that a scrambled egg can't be unscrambled--entropy increases--experience is subject to the arrow of time. And the infinite sadness of my life consists in that I only recognize the beauty of simple arrangements from the relative vantage of the scrambled; memory, not experience, is my only access to it. Anxiety is the progression toward equilibrium. Despair is the inescapability. Insanity is the rationalizing of it all. Sanity is the irrational acceptance of it all. Indifference is just detached therapy. And progression--activity / toil / tasks / success / failure--just coping distraction and procrastination, just ill-placed deferment--my preferred route. And crisis--”
― Jack Foster, Fresh Fruit: A Preface

“Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

“national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century