Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
If you want to be popular, do not try to be popular all the time. Popular government does not mean that you do popular things all the time. We do not want to be unpopular or to do unpopular things. But when they are necessary, they will be done.
Kuan Yew Lee • The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew
Once Johnson realized that he was not to be given a high position in the war, the change in his attitude toward it was dramatic. In O. J. Weber’s recollection, “He regarded it as an interference with his agenda.” He resented its demands on his staff, but, despite the strategic placement of Willard Deason in the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel, and Johns
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II
“The hard decisions,” Ridgway added, “are not the ones you make in the heat of battle. Far harder to make are those involved in speaking your mind about some hare-brained scheme, which proposes to commit troops to action under conditions where failure is almost certain, and the only results will be the needless sacrifice of priceless lives.”
Jean Edward Smith • Eisenhower in War and Peace
Many of the state’s conservative business leaders had, once the excitement of the campaign had faded, reached the same conclusion as Busby, and realized they had been unjust to Stevenson, and they asked him to run—ample financing assured—for Tom Connally’s Senate seat in 1952; he would, after all, be only sixty-four years old, they pointed out. He
... See moreRobert A. Caro • Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson II
In January 1968, with disaster looming in Vietnam, the Gallup poll named Eisenhower the man most admired by the American people—an honor he had previously won in 1950 and 1952.
Jean Edward Smith • Eisenhower in War and Peace
... See moreRussell was for twenty-six years either Chairman or dominant member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversaw the battle readiness of the nation’s far-flung legions and armadas. As senators of Rome had insisted that, regardless of the cost, the legions must be kept at full complement because the peace and stability of the known world—th
In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters • Zero to One
The late Richard Daley, former mayor of Chicago and considered one of the 10 best mayors in American history, did not run for that office until he was 53 years old.
Jeffrey Pfeffer • Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't
At the time of the Camp David summit in July 2000, however, I’d been a politician for all of five years. Most of my life by far had been spent in uniform. As a teenager, small and slight and not even shaving yet, I was part of the founding core of a unit called Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s equivalent of America’s Delta Force or Britain’s Special Air Se
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