Euan Ross

“Complexity catastrophes help explain why bureaucracy seems to grow with the tenacity of weeds. Many companies go through bureaucracy-clearing exercises only to find it has sprung back a few years later. No one ever sits down to deliberately design a bureaucratic muddle. Instead, bureaucracy springs up as people just try to optimize their local patch of the network: finance is just trying to ensure that the numbers add up, legal wants to keep us out of jail, and marketing is trying to promote the brand. The problem isn't dumb people or evil intentions. Rather, network growth creates interdependencies, interdependencies create conflicting constraints, and conflicting constraints create slow decision making and, ultimately, bureaucratic gridlock.”
― Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

“The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke