ed

The main thing holding the family back from a change in living quarters was far more their complete hopelessness and the idea that they had been struck by a misfortune like no one else in their entire circle of relatives and acquaintances.

Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.

I kept thinking about the fact that humans have an extremely small chance (if we have one at all) to save ourselves from destruction in the next few years, and that the only thing that could save us would be everyone just stopping, refusing to be part of the insistence on growth that almost no one questions, even though it is deadly.

Pessimism drifts in the air like a virulent pathogen, infecting multitudes.

Wiltshire arrives at similar results: Workers in counties where a Walmart opened experienced a greater decline in earnings than they made up for with cost savings, leaving them worse off overall. Even more interesting, he finds that the losses weren't limited to workers in the retail industry; they affected basically every sector from manufacturing

“Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.”