People From Michigan

"Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century."

"The corporation's legally defined mandates to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others. As a result, I argue, the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies."

"I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me."

"A spear carrier is somebody who stands in the hall when Caesar passes, comes to attention and thumps his spear. A spear carrier is the anonymous character cut down by the hero as he advances to save the menaced heroine. A spear carrier is a character put in a story to be used like a piece of disposable tissue. In a story, spear carriers never suddenly assert themselves by throwing their spears aside and saying, “I resign. I don’t want to be used.“ They are there to be used, either for atmosphere or as minor obstacles in the path of the hero. The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers. We take no joy in being used and discarded. I was finding then, that wet, chilly, unhappy night, that I took no joy in seeing other people used and discarded.”"

"Brains are no good if you don’t use them."

"It left me there, the Compleat Young Girl, hell on wheels. I could build one-fifteenth of a log cabin, kill one-thirty-first of a tiger, kiss, do needlepoint, pass through an obstacle course, and come pretty close (in theory) to killing somebody with my bare hands. What did I have to worry about?"

"I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions."

"The rest of our weekend—sleeping arrangements, hand-done work, hand-prepared food—was simple enough to please Thoreau, who I am convinced was a nice fellow who confused rustic vacations with life."

"Whether or not your actions are determined, you have to act on the assumption that you have free will. If you are determined, your attempt at free will loses you nothing. However, if you are not determined and you act on the assumption that you are, you will never attempt anything. You will simply be a passive blob that things happen to."

"I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a huddled heap and puke. It would probably disrupt the concept of heroics for all time."

"Some people get a feeling of power from being unpleasant."

"I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue."

"There’s no reason to trade insults. We have our way of life and they have theirs. I wouldn’t live as they do, but disrespect seems pointless. I’m sure there are good people among them."

"You can’t stamp on people and not get hurt in return."

"Population pressure is the ultimate cause of every war."

"[...] legal curbs on corporate freedoms are needed to protect citizen's freedom."

"Corporations have no internal constraints to stop them from flouting the law. Their legal makeup compels them to pursue profit and growth but say nothing about whether they have to abide by the law in doing so. As a result, decisions to break the law depend, as do all others, on whether the benefits outweigh the costs."

"The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy."

"The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good."

"Deregulation freed corporations from legal constraints, and privatization empowered them to govern areas of society from which they had been previously been excluded. By the end of the century, the corporation had become the world's dominant institution. Yet history humbles dominant institutions."

"These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be."

"A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image."

"The notion that business and government are and should be partners is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and repeated like a mantra by leaders in both domains. It seems a compelling and innocuous idea - until you think about what it really means."

"As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way."

"The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit."

"As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others."

"Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal."

"Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable."

"By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments."

"As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments."

"The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries , was - and is - its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people."

"The way I solved the theoretical problem was to go into the shop and build something concrete."

"My family isn’t posh; they’re musicians."

"But as usual there’s no answer to this. As usual, that’s just how it is."

"Clare takes a mouthful, swallows it in a businesslike fashion, and says, “Well, that’s not so bad.” “That’s a twenty-something-dollar bottle of wine.” “Oh. Well, that was marvelous.”"

"That’s what I love you for: your inability to perceive all my hideous flaws."

"“But don’t you think,” I persist, “that it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”"

"Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will."

"There is an ancient Chinese saying "He who labours with his mind rules over he who labours with his hand". This kind of backward idea is very harmful to youngsters from developing countries. Partly because of this type of concept, many students from these countries are inclined towards theoretical studies and avoid experimental work. In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work."

"A lot of spiritual gains come through pain, hurt, struggle, confusion and disappointment."

"God is committed to developing a people who will reflect his character in this world, and his character always expresses concern and compassion for the afflicted."

"When Jesus prayed the model prayer we call the Lord's Prayer, his first requests were that God's name be shown reverence, that his kingdom come, that his will be done."

"How would you feel if your prayer requests were made public, displayed on a billboard or marquee? "Dear Lord, make me famous. Make me rich.""

"Prayer busters (causes of unanswered prayer) are prayerlessness, unconfessed sin, unresolved relational conflict, selfishness, uncaring attitudes, and inadequate faith."

"If you're tolerating sin in your life, my friend, don't waste your breath praying unless it's a prayer of confession."

"If you let even a little sin into your heart, it's going to contaminate your prayers. Your Christian life will not achieve its full potential."

"Unconfessed sin cuts off our communication with the Father."

"Are you expecting God to fill your needs? Are you asking him to do so - regularly, earnestly and persistently?"

"The most common cause of unanswered prayer is prayerlessness."

"The greatest prayer motivator in existence is answered prayer."