“A question of vision. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck […]
“‘Perhaps the savages will always be in control,’ Philip said gloomily. ‘Perhaps greed will always outweigh wisdom in the councils of the mighty; perhaps fear will always overcome compassion in the mind of a man with a sword in his hand.’” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 15284
“The most expensive part of a building is the mistakes.” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 9609 “Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering […]
There was a time when I thought Michael V. Hayden and his ilk were scum, but, as Hayden himself acknowledges: “You can only dehumanize an enemy from a distance” (238). Once I let Hayden into my head, he gave my liberal, civilian ass a serious reality check. Despite its nonlinear format and a bevy of […]
“A sense of doom swamped Aliena. This was to be their fate, then: Richard would avenge Father, and she would take care of Richard. For her it would be a mission of revenge, for if Richard became earl, William Hamleigh would lose his inheritance. It flashed across her mind that no one had asked her […]
“‘Highborn people make poor servants. They are disobedient, resentful, thoughtless, touchy, and they think they’re working hard even though they do less than everyone else––so they cause trouble among the rest of the staff.’ He shrugged. ‘This is my experience.’” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 6638 “We make much in […]
“I have often compared the current evolution of cyberspace to the last great age of globalization, the centuries of European discovery. That era, for all its accomplishments, jammed together the good and the bad and the weak and the strong in ways that had never been experienced before. What the Europeans got out it was […]
“In September 2005, following the London Tube bombings, Manningham-Buller (now chief of MI5) advocated that ‘there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of civil liberties we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives.’ I realized later […]
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so annoyed by a book that taught me so much. Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations is, in some ways, exactly what it claims to be––a guide for creating organizations with internal dynamics that radically diverge from prevailing models. But it’s also a highly repetitive text with a lot of fuzzy […]
“Hunger is the best seasoning.” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 939 “We don’t have much time. Because our mind predisposes us to think of trends as linear, we often fail to grasp the urgency of the situation. The demand we place on the planet grows, like our economies, not linearly […]