“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” - Issac Asimov
"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
"UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not."
-Lorax, Dr. Seuss
“Some people fall in love with people’s flowers and not their root’s so when it becomes autumn, they don’t know what to do.”
"Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love." - East of Eden
“You see, there’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be." - East of Eden
there is plenty in your life that will not be your fault, but will end up being your responsibility.
Driven out of his home country of Austria, on the run from the Hitler's SS and Gestapo’s, he arrives in Geneva. As a vivid testimony to his character, upon arrival instead of sulking, disparaging and being pessimistic about the state of the world the first thing he does is sit down, and start writing the book that became Human Action, the most comprehensive, systematic, forthright, and powerful defense of the economics of liberty ever written.
[Lee] lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.
Lee wiped his steel-rimmed spectacles on a dish towel. He opened the book and leafed through. And he smiled to himself, consciously searching for reassurance.
He read slowly, moving his lips over the words. “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.
“Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.”
Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.”
Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.”
Suddenly Lee felt good. He wondered whether Sam’l Hamilton had ever missed his book or known who stole it. It had seemed to Lee the only clean pure way was to steal it. And he still felt good about it. His fingers caressed the smooth leather of the binding as he took it back and slipped it under the breadbox. He said to himself, “But of course he knew who took it. Who else would have stolen Marcus Aurelius?” He went into the sitting room and pulled a chair near to the sleeping Adam.