Jim > Recent Status Updates

Greece was poor and mountainous and even an army of 20,000 had to keep moving if it intended to live off the land. This left local farmers very little to live on after so large an army had passed by, which is another reason why Greece was relatively depopulated by the Roman era.

One reason for the success of the Hellenistic kingdoms—and this book will argue that the Hellenistic kingdoms were massively successful—was that Greek rulers of Egypt, Anatolia, Persia, and points east did not try to change the peoples they ruled.

If the Greeks were gone and their monuments were dust there were still vestiges of their way of life to be found in the food, the wine and the wild flowers of the land they had inhabited and treasured.

I blame the version of capitalism which is destroying the world: you have to be a shit to survive, but your spouse and kids will hate you for turning yourself into a shit and failing to protect them from—yourself.

There’s only one real instruction. Forget the Eightfold Path if it doesn’t apply to your situation. Be one of those who travel to the Far Shore. The Buddha doesn’t give a broken alms bowl how you get there, just do it before it’s too late. There isn’t a lot of time left. That’s all I can tell you.

The pen. That is indeed, no doubt, a worthy tool; yet of little use to the laity. Those things it is needful to know are written already, and, should more ever be necessary, are there not monks to write ir?

And follow not the way of the sword for the lawyers ever defeat it with their pens, as hath been said of old; but follow the [Black] Art, and you shall deal in a matter at whose mention lawyers pale.

Would he save Malou? That would be worse. People would have to see him again with his deformed face, and, knowing him, he would be quite capable of walking about the streets like that, of taking his place again at the Cafe de Paris, of becoming a sort of living reproach.

Again, according to his habit, [Shakespeare] besprinkles the political scenes liberally with the names of off-stage personages, a complication which caused an absent-minded "King Henry" to declare in perfect pentameters that:

The Earl of Whatsisname, Lord Something Else,
Some kind of Bishop and two other guys
Capitulate against us, and are up.

A stock revival, which would always fill a gap, was vividly known as a "get-penny." But the repertory changed very rapidly, and authors were constantly called upon to turn out new plays like sausages from a machine. There was no sitting in a vacuum clasping his domed brow and waiting for the Muse to descend, in Shakespeare's busy life.

Had Jackson been a truly wild man—blustery, threatening, and senselessly violent, both in his emotions and his actions—then he would not have risen so far. Of course, he had his moments of bluster, and he made threats, and he could, at times, seem senselessly violent, but on the whole Jackson gambled only when he liked his odds, and when he had taken care to protect himself from the worst that could happen.

Partly because of his defeat at the hands of the House in 1825, partly because of his fear of the Bank, partly because of his distrust of entrenched freeholders, Jackson believed the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to mthose who were on the inside.

But how did [Jackson] transform himself from a "slobbering" young man lashing out at an unfair and largely uncaring world to become ... a cool calculator? Part of the answer lies in the fact that his ambition to succeed was matched by his intellectual capacity to realize that his anger would tend to block, not fuel, his rise.

Thank Buddha my mother had the smarts and the ruthlessness to get out long for long enough to make a pile -- and start a brothel of her own: nobody escapes the cycle of karma, not even a Buddha.

In their hygienic anonymity, [the convention delegates] form a quite distinct tribe, prompting me to ponder that perhaps Bangkok is located on some cosmic intersection where visitors from different galaxies mingle, but never communicate.

Isn't there a saying that the only thing more dangerous than a man with a gun is a nervous man with a gun? If there isn't, there should be.

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat belt signs lit up, problems switched off.

I don't like dealing with mney transactions in poor countries. I get confused between feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and hating getting ripped off.

Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.

The truth is most [members of the Mafia] are stupid and at best capable of holding only menial jobs. They use dog-pack intimidation to get what they want, whether it involves preferential seating in a restaurant or taking over a labor union. On a personal level their sexual habits are adolescent or misogynistic, their social behavior inept and laughable.

Wake up, big mon. Rich guys don't care whether the rest of us believe them or not. That's why they're great liars.

This is a portrait of a special place in a special time -- an imaginary city, as i have suggested -- and yet it was the dream factory of the 1940's that created much of what Americans today regard as reality.

It is classical music, and is considered the best and most puzzling ever manufactured. You're supposed to like ir, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?

O King of Gods, I have known the dreadful dissolution of the universe. I have seen all perish, again and again, at the end of every cycle. At that terrible time, every single atom dissolves into the primal pure waters of eternity, whence originally all arose.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. (March 11, 1856)

I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire -- thinner than the paper on which it is printed -- then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

Ah, dear nature, the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.

Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me, not without reason, notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp, yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness.

In winter, when fodder runs short, the Kashmiris pack their [sacred cows] together in a confined space until they begin to sweat, then turn them out into the snow, in the hope that they will catch pneumonia and die.

All around me men and women, stiff as mummies, drank their tea in silence, eyes fixed on the Promenade des Anglais. Maybe they, too, were on the lookout for silhouettes from their past amid this crowd passing before their eyes.