People From British Columbia

"Even if you hate Russia and want to see it nuked or levelled today, you still need to understand your enemy. You need to understand how they think in order to compete with them."

"[About Aleksandr Dugin:] There are so many people who call him a fascist and it triggers me so much because that just tells me they're talking about Dugin when they haven't even read the first three pages of his book. He hates fascism."

"[About the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022:] It's a more complex issue that just 'Russian big baddie', 'West big good guy'. Do I think invading Ukraine is a good thing? No, of course not. I hate having to always put these stipulations before everything I say when I have a conversation. Of course what they are doing is bad but we still need to consider the good parts of their ideology and the good critiques they have, because if we have no self-criticizm as the West as a liberal society, we're going to become exactly what they expect us to do: Some culture that just becomes Unicron and tries to eat the rest of the world and never self-reflects."

"I think it's terrifying that we're banning all of this Russian media, because we're gonna get one story and it's going to be completely different from what the other half of the world hears. You're going to have the Western story and view of reality, and the [Eastern-Eurasian] story and view of reality. And we're going to have completely different world views to a terrifying extent. [...] We cannot operate in a world with only 50 percent of the story. We're gonna all become little North Koreas [...]."

"I saw the other day, it was horrific, they had Russian soldiers in Red Square going through and asking people to see what was on their phone and saying 'We're going to arrest you if you don't show us what's on your phone. [...] Because we need to see if you're posting pro-Ukraine stuff.' Horrific. Unfortunately this happens in the West as well, just people can't see it publically yet."

"I think it's fantastic that Twitter has come out and put a little thing that says 'Russian state affiliated media' behind RT. I think it's fantastic that they put 'Chinese state affiliated media' behind that. Now where the hell is the BBC, CBC and all of the Western ones? Why do we not show that our states fund media as well? [...] We all have the exact same temptation to appeal to where our checks come from."

"I think this is the problem when everything is down to your property, your banking. All of that is so centralized in government hands and control. People know they have nothing they can do, especially when you have a kid. When you have a kid [...] they will have you by the throat. There is nothing you can do. Because any decision you make to try to stand up to what you feel is oppressive horrible government policy is going to affect your child [...] so you're putting them at risk."

"[About her reputation:] [I think] that there is a bit of an unfair retrospect going on here where at that time it was way more controversial to say the things that I was saying than it is now. And if I had waited five years, I don't think I would have had the reputation that I have today whatsoever."

"On one level, then, Cadbury can be seen as a classic example of Victorian industrial paternalism, albeit carried to greater lengths than in most other companies of the day. On another level, however, the Cadbury system resulted in a very strong, highly flexible organisation which, thanks to the strong levels of employee commitment and participation, could draw on a large bank of experience and intelligence to solve problems and undertake what amounted to continuous improvement. The employee participation system in particular meant that Cadbury was constantly upgrading its processes and products. Herbert Casson regarded Cadbury in the 1920s as one of the best-run companies in Britain, if not the world, and summed up the key to its success very succinctly: ‘At Cadbury, everybody thinks.’"

"Gareth Morgan is best known as the creator of the concept of 'organisational metaphors' as a management tool. His greatest insight has been to determine that, while there is no one model of organisation that can entirely capture the essence of organisation, it is possible by means of metaphors to look at organisations from different angles and see different facets"

"In retrospect, Mooney’s mission looks incredibly naive. It is astonishing that he could have been so close to affairs in Germany and yet not have realised the true nature of the Nazi regime; but it seems this was so. His efforts, though made in good faith, were kept secret at first, but eventually news leaked out and in the summer of 1940 PM magazine in the USA ran a series of articles accusing Mooney of Nazi sympathies and linking his meeting with Hitler to his earlier receipt of the German Order of Merit for services to industry in 1938."

"Arie de Geus is a former executive with Royal Dutch/Shell who, together with Peter M. Senge, is responsible for the development of the concept of the ‘learning organisation’. In the early 1990s it was Senge, through his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline (1990), who did most to disseminate and popularise the concept. More recently, however, de Geus has produced an important body of writing in his own right, notably The Living Company (1997), in which he takes an organic and holistic view of organisations and closely links their ability to learn with the extent to which they are integrated into their environment."

"Herbert Casson was a highly prolific writer on management, with a career as a management guru spanning some four decades. A skilled writer who was also a successful entrepreneur, he used his own experiences and acute observations of the world around him to develop a philosophy of management based on the concept of ‘efficiency’. He published more than seventy books, which by the time of his death had sold more than half a million copies around the world. Something of a maverick, he was never really accepted by the business academic community in either Britain or America. His books were popular and populist, highly entertaining and full of penetrating insight."

"My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."

"“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?” “He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.” “Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?” “Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said."

"Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true?"

"Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor."

"She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her."

"It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom."

"The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he’s been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now."

"“Hell is other actors,” Kirsten said. “Also ex-boyfriends.”"

"The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week."

"What is time travel if not a security problem?"

"Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense."

"“You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “‘The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”"

"Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?"

"She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones."

"There occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit."

"I would rather do a dangerous job than a job that makes me comatose with boredom."

"What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself."

"It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here."

"“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said."

"“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”"

"If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life."

"“My secret is, I hate people,” the woman said, very sincerely, and for the first time Mirella liked her. “All people?” “All except maybe like three,” she said."

"This whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him."

"If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness."

"Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin."

"He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret."

"She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded."

"“I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.” “Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming. “But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking. “Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren’t. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that’s all there is.” “What if we were saved for a different reason?” “Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often. “Some people were saved. People like us.” “What do you mean, ‘people like us’?” “People who were good,” Tyler said.”People who weren’t weak.” “Look, it’s not a question of having been bad or...the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”"

"Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together."

"“I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be."

"Twenty-third Street wasn’t busy—a little early for the lunch crowd—but he kept getting trapped behind iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens."

"Hell is the absence of the people you long for."

"“They call themselves the light.” “What about it?” “If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?” “I suppose.” “If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”"

"WILLIAM VICKREY DIED on October 11, 1996, three days after the announcement that the 1996 Bank of Sweden prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel was being awarded to him and to Professor James Mirrlees of Cambridge “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.” Vickrey was eighty-two years old and had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since April 1996. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences refers specifically to his work in the mid-forties on income taxation, then in the early sixties on auctions. With characteristic independence, Vickrey reacted by privileging instead his work of the late thirties on cumulative averaging of income for tax purposes and his then current concern with unemployment. Early insights, lifetime dedication, and late recognition are unmistakable traits of a truly remarkable career devoted to economics in the service of the public sector."

"Market Anti-Inflation Plans In such a context, it should be clear that balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief."

""What made you think of Valium anyway?" I said. "I don't know. Maybe it was all that Valium that I took?" she said."

"...there is something larger that’s looming out there. A force that remains patient and silent. An entity that waits to teach a lesson that we have yet to grasp. It is much better to just lie there and let it roll over you like some immense army of unquestionable wonder."