Rob

“When there wasn’t a speaker, he often organized round robins. One such evening, a woman from Lead and Asbestos Information Center, Inc., had started off by announcing, “There is money to be made on lead,” to a room of landlords who more often lost money trying to abate it. One landlord asked whether he would have to report the presence of asbestos to the city or the tenants if he tested for it. “No, you don’t,” the woman had said.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Paul S. Kozemchak (1948–2017), DARPA’s longest-serving employee, shared a shocking story with me, in a 2014 interview, that planted a seed for this book. “Guess how many nuclear missiles were detonated during the Cuban Missile Crisis?” he asked, then continued: “I can tell you that the answer is not ‘none.’ The answer is ‘several,’ as in four.” Two by the U.S. (on October 20 and October 26, 1962), and two by the Soviet Union (on October 22 and October 28, 1962), each of which was exploded in space. Firing off nuclear weapons tests in a DEFCON 2 environment was testing fate.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“5. Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“is true that because of much greater employment the total income from wages and salaries grew from twenty-five billion marks to forty-two billions, an increase of 66 per cent. But income from capital and business rose much more steeply—by 146 per cent. All the propagandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the worker. But a sober study of the official statistics, which perhaps few Germans bothered to make, revealed that the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi policies.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany