People From New York City

"Fools can make an omen of anything in retrospect."

"He was a lawyer before he worked his way up to pimping."

"Dawn comes early when you wish it would not. The hours flash when you want them to drag."

"“They think you’re a witch. They lost everything because of a witch.” “Stupid thinking.” “Never any shortage of stupid, girl.”"

"I do hope that karma is the keystone of the universe—even if I have to come back as a banana slug myself."

"No captive was smart enough to speak a language any of us knew. Talking loud or slow did not help."

"Might may not make right, but it makes victory."

"Slight gasp. “You grow too bold.” Didn’t I? “I’m sorry. Thinking out loud. An unhealthy habit known to be the cause of bruises and major hemorrhaging.”"

"I guess each of us, at some time, finds one person with whom we are compelled toward absolute honesty, one person whose good opinion of us becomes a substitute for the broader opinion of the world. And that opinion becomes more important than all our sneaky, sleazy schemes of greed, lust, self-aggrandizement, whatever we are up to while lying the world into believing we are just plain nice folks."

"I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask."

"To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They’ve always been a cigar. When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible."

"I don't like the new trends in horror. All this torture stuff seems really mean-spirited. People have forgotten how to laugh, and I don't see anybody who's using it as allegory. The guy I love right now is Guillermo del Toro. I'd love to make a film like Pan's Labyrinth."

"Literacy is sorcery itself in the hinterland."

"No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshipers’ description. I don’t see how they could survive their own insanity. But it’s not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny."

"“A teacher?” “Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which here is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves.” “Interesting.” “Well. Yes. There is god of sorts, Croaker. Do you know? Not a mover and shaker, though. Simply a negator. An ender of tales. He has a hunger that cannot be sated. The universe itself will slide down his maw.” “Death?” “I do not want to die, Croaker. All that I am shrieks against the unrighteousness of death. All that I am, was, and probably will be, is shaped by my passion to evade the end of me.” She laughed quietly, but there was a thread of hysteria there. She gestured, indicating the shadowed killing ground below. “I would have built a world in which I was safe. And the cornerstone of my citadel would have been death.” The end of the dream was drawing close. I could not imagine a world without me in it, either. And the inner me was outraged. Is outraged. I have no trouble imagining someone becoming obsessed with escaping death. “I understand.” “Maybe. We’re all equals at the dark gate, no? The sands run for us all. Life is but a flicker shouting into the jaws of eternity. But it seems so damned unfair!”"

"Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?"

"“We all do that. In every day life it’s called making excuses.” True, raw motives are too rough to swallow. By the time most people reach my age, they have glossed their motives so often and so well they fall completely out of touch with them."

"She is not one to disdain truth indefinitely only because it is unpleasant."

"The light overcame the shadow. But as always, the shadow left its taint on the victors."

"This soiree must have been so big that if held today, we’d call it a war. Or at least a riot. On and on. So-and-so of such-and-such, with Lady Who’s-is, sixteen titles, four of which made sense. By the time the heralds finished proclaiming everyone, the party must have died of encroaching senility."

"He is blind to the dead, to the burning villages, to the starving children. As is the Rebel. Two blind armies, able to see nothing but one another."

"Are lovers ever honest?"

"I am honored and humbled to be nominated by the President to lead the FBI, the premier law enforcement organization in the world. From my earliest days working with agents as a line prosecutor to my time working with them at the Department of Justice in the aftermath of 9/11, I have been inspired by the men and women of the FBI – inspired by their professionalism, integrity, courage, and sacrifice for the public. If confirmed, it will be a privilege and honor to once again work with them. America faces grave threats both here and abroad, and the FBI, in concert with its federal, state, and local partners continues to work steadfastly to prevent and hold accountable those responsible for these threats. I look forward to the confirmation process, and pledge my complete commitment to fairly and honorably protecting our country and upholding our Constitution and laws."

"One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us."

"He is an impeccably qualified individual, and I know that he will again serve his country as a fierce guardian of the law and model of integrity once the Senate confirms him to lead the FBI."

"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone."

"Going beyond your every day capacity is such a fulfilling feeling."

"Meditation gives you the capacity to overcome obstacles and go beyond your limitations."

"I admit that most of my records are silly, but they do require serious training."

"I feel great. I feel that I achieved self transcendence. I pushed beyond what I had done before by a lot and I'm very, very happy."

"Everything is in slow motion down there and silent. It could replace psychotherapy."

"A modern-day Menabrea"

"By the mid-seventies, Elliott had become the foremost expository writer of computer science."

"I am such a slow learner that once I understand something I might as well write it down!"

"This is great stuff, but does it have to be so complicated?"

"Homeschooling works because schooling is not the same thing as education. School is not the only place to learn, to grow up. Universities and colleges recognize this fact whenever they admit homeschoolers who have never attended school."

"Homeschooling is not a panacea to all our educational problems, but it is part of the answer. It is a proven option for any of you who wish to try it."

"Homeschooling is radical, in the root sense of the word: in Latin, radicus means root. Compulsory schooling (forced attendance), and now, in the twenty-first century, compulsory education (forced learning) are very recent petals and offshoots of the root way humankind has historically nurtured its young into responsible adults and active citizens. Family, community, religious institutions, and work were all integrated into the daily lives and upbringing of children... The concept of universal compulsory schooling is a very recent idea, one that is not even two hundred years old, yet we act as if it is an ancient, sure-fire way to make sure our children 'learn something.'"

"Unschooling is first and foremost an educational approach. Unschooling was not created by Holt, nor propagated by my colleagues and me since Holt’s death in 1985, to be an ideological parenting method, though I think unschooling certainly informs one’s parenting. Just as we trust children to discover and learn things in their own way, so, too, can parents be trusted to figure out how unschooling will work in their family and adapt it to their relationships with each of their children."

"I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything."

"Monetarism was a powerful force in economic debate for about three decades after Friedman first propounded the doctrine in his 1959 book A Program for Monetary Stability. Today, however, it is a shadow of its former self, for two main reasons.First, when the United States and the United Kingdom tried to put monetarism into practice at the end of the 1970s, both experienced dismal results: in each country steady growth in the money supply failed to prevent severe recessions. The Federal Reserve officially adopted Friedman-type monetary targets in 1979, but effectively abandoned them in 1982 when the unemployment rate went into double digits. This abandonment was made official in 1984, and ever since then the Fed has engaged in precisely the sort of discretionary fine-tuning that Friedman decried. ... Second, since the early 1980s the Federal Reserve and its counterparts in other countries have done a reasonably good job, undermining Friedman’s portrayal of central bankers as irredeemable bunglers. Inflation has stayed low, recessions—except in Japan, of which more in a second—have been relatively brief and shallow. And all this happened in spite of fluctuations in the money supply that horrified monetarists, and led them—Friedman included—to predict disasters that failed to materialize. As David Warsh of The Boston Globe pointed out in 1992, "Friedman blunted his lance forecasting inflation in the 1980s, when he was deeply, frequently wrong."

"That combination, Hayek, Myrdal and Robinson, might have cast the contributions of each into sharper relief: three pioneers who, after important early contributions, gave up economics for political activism."

"Everyone in Boston of a certain age knows the story of Rosie Ruiz, the marathoner who crossed the Boston finish line in 1980 at 2:31.56, flabby thighs and all, having barely broken a sweat. Despite mounting skepticism, she basked in the glory of having run the third-fastest female marathon in history – for a few days, that is, until a couple of students remembered seeing her jump out of the crowd half a mile from the finish. Something of the sort has been going on recently with the shade of Friedrich von Hayek. The Austrian economist, who died in 1992 just short of what would have been his ninety-third birthday, never made false claims for himself – far from it: he knew all too well the loneliness of the long distance runner. And scrupulous work as editor by the late W.W. Bartley, interpreter Bruce Caldwell, and biographer Alan Ebenstein, have made it possible to see the man clear. But the claims conservatives are making about the role he played as an economist are beginning to smack of Ruizismus. That is, they have jumped a caricature out of the bushes late in the day and claim that their guy ran a great race."

"Lucas’s “Mechanics” Lectures caught the profession by surprise. His argument enraged some economists and startled or puzzled others. It was his first word on the subject of growth. It seemed to have come completely out of the blue. And even though his interest in the possibility of market failure seemed curiously in tune with fifty years of the Keynesian tradition, it was unfamiliar enough when expressed in the vernacular of Freshwater economics that the lectures at first caused more consternation than anything else, and in most quarters they were studiously ignored. A few young researchers, however, were galvanized into immediate action. The notion that trade and migration must be strongly linked to economic growth was hardly new. Nor was the insight that cities must be central to economic progress. Perhaps the real news from Lucas’s lectures was his identification of lock-in as a potentially serious puzzle."

"John Maynard Keynes may have had more influence on policy makers, Milton Friedman on citizens, Kenneth Arrow on economic theory, but Samuelson had more influence on the way economics is done today, and the purposes to which it is put, than any other economist of the twentieth century."

"The famous sixteenth-century algebraist Jerome Cardan called negative roots fictitious, and the founder of modern symbolic algebra, François Viète, discarded negative roots entirely. Descartes, called them false on the ground that they represented numbers less than nothing and so were meaningless."

"The minimum principle that unified the knowledge of light, gravitation, and electricity of Hamilton's time no longer suffices to relate these fundamental branches of physics. Within fifty years of its creation, the belief that Hamilton's principle would outlive all other physical laws of physics was shattered. Minimum principles have since been created for separate branches of physics... but these are not only restricted... but seem to be contrived... A single minimum principle, a universal law governing all processes in nature, is still the direction in which the search for simplicity is headed, with the price of simplicity now raised from a mastery of differential equations to a mastery of the calculus of variations."

"The unnaturalness of mathematical symbolism is attested to by history. The algebra of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Hindus, and the Arabs was what is commonly called rhetorical algebra. ...on the whole they used ordinary rhetoric to describe their mathematical work. Symbolism is a relatively modern invention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries..."

"The Hindus saw clearly that if the arithmetic operations... were properly defined for negative numbers, these numbers could be employed to as good advantage as people had previously derived from positive numbers. ...To people to whom the word number had always meant positive whole numbers and positive fractions, the very idea that there could be other numbers came hard. For many centuries negative numbers were either rejected or treated as second-class citizens. What was especially difficult for mathematicians to swallow was that negative numbers could be acceptable roots of equations."

"The chief innovator of symbolism in algebra was François Viète... an amateur in the sense that his professional life was devoted to the law... John Wallis... says that Viète, in denoting a class of numbers by a letter, followed the custom of lawyers who discussed legal cases by using arbitrary names [for the litigants]... and later the abbreviations... and still more briefly A, B, and C. Actually, letters had been used occasionally by the Greek Diophantus and by the Hindus. However, in these cases letters were confined to designating a fixed unknown number, powers of that number, and some operations. Viète recognized that a more extensive use of letters, and, in particular, the use of letters to denote classes of numbers, would permit the development of a new kind of mathematics; this he called logistica speciosa in distinction from logistica numerosa. ...the growth of symbolism was slow. Even simple ideas take hold slowly. Only in the last few centuries has the use of symbolism become widespread and effective."