Parries

June 2013

Go Deny Yourself

This little four-letter word undermines our modern values of tolerance and presumption of innocence.

December 2012

Some Consumer Affairs

I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.

April 2012

From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S

Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.

February 2012

2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous

After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.

January 2012

A Scheme of a Number of Friends

Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.

October 2011

The Mouse and the Cantilever

Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.

March 2010

Friendship is for Weenies

It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.

Before the Setup

Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.

February 2010

Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio

On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.

October 2009

My Hope: Obama’s Change

Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.

July 2009

At Modi’in Mall

There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.

Israel, the Bad So Far

I’m surprised at the general appearance of Tel Aviv folks. Yes, it’s hot, but people appear dressed as if they’re in, I don’t know, Be’er Sheva. And the people in Be’er Sheva, last time I was there, looked to me like they’re dressed for Gaza.

June 2009

60 Days of Bikram Yoga

Tomorrow morning I return to Bikram Yoga practice after two days off. I’ve just done 60 days in a row. So what has it done?

March 2009

Namaste, Dharma Workmen

What do the Lost characters mostly want these days? It’s not to get off the island. Increasingly, the island is just where they live and love. If anything, they’ve found home — or, rather, their home found them.

February 2009

24, Lost Get Soft

When life gets fast, unlike how it’s lived by most of us out here in the dark, loyalties are quickly superceded by new circumstances. This is not despite values but because of them. Such Darwinian churn is a theme shared by the very different Lost and 24 and so might just be a defining one for our times.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Buddha

If someone is living life in reverse time while the rest of us are living it forwards, then our world is Buddhist, because such an impossibility falsifies reality, which must therefore be a dream.

January 2009

Shanghai Europe

So, finally, we stopped yesterday; the Israeli assault of late 2008/early 2009 on Gaza is over. With it, Israel lost moral purity and made vital strategic gains.

Panning for MacBook Pro

Even if it did nothing, was just a prop in a futuristic movie, the MacBook Pro would be impressive. It’s like a sculpture of my previous computer, the MacBook, except it’s actually an improved computer! So even though I’m looking at it now and touching it to write these words, I’m going to stop now just to look at it and touch it.

December 2008

Stop Yesterday

Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.

Short-circuiting Place-based Longing

If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.

October 2008

Ebullience, Please

A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.

September 2008

History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama

McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.

Encounter at Wetherspoone’s

As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.

August 2008

A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1

Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.

July 2008

Suddenly Seymour

Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.

June 2008

Another End of Times

With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.

Dead Till Eilenspiegel

Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.

All So Simple

First, there is a general moode and desire to write.

March 2008

Why AAPL

Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.

Clash of the Midgets

My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.

AdamKhan.net


Get fed up with me:

Fade to Black...

More Light!

We honor the rich becausethey have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Buildings, too, are children of the Earth and Sun.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Write a book on how to write a book.

It only ends once; anything that happens before that is just progress.

Jacob

He had a bad conscience because he had not taken revenge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Science fiction provides shortcuts to profundity.

In the foster home my hair was my room.

Erin Hannon, at lunch with Michael Scott

Writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm.

Jim Walsh

It’s easier to modify appetites than to curtail them.

Constraints amount to the solution half-built.

Andy Rutledge

Being in Italy is—sadly for my high-falutin’ ambitions — mostly just a nuisance.

Be free, belong, believe!

You cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another.

Michael Crichton

Instead of concentrating on fat, you should carefully watch how much protein from prepared food you are eating.

Wai

Coffee spreads darkness. Tea is wholesome only in the morning.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It was one of the few times in my life that I realized that the artist is much ahead of me.

Woody Allen, on finally liking Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey the third time around

I would rather sit in front of a machine fighting through a writer’s block than I would do anything else.

Jean M. Auel

If inertia is the dominant factor during most of life, then momentum must be during quickenings.

Hubris. Is it believing one is exempt, or knowing one isn’t and proceeding nonetheless?

Out of my head all the time; in the bid for a rhyme.

Shuggie Otis

The Bond movies tend to go downhill once you see henchmen in jumpsuits.

John Gruber

We either take each other for everything we are or leave the life we’ve made behind and make a brand new start.

The Carpenters

Being pro-Palestinian… [is] moral onanism.

Bret Stephens

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is a learned ability.

The originality—I shouldn’t even callsomething worth talking about.”

http://www.newyorker.com/?p=2944361&mbid=social_tablet_t

she is not proud of her virtue, she is only proud in order to preserve her virtue.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile)

The more routine I can make the basic practical aspects of my life, the more I am able to be energetic—and spontaneous—about intellectual and other things.

Stephen Wolfram

Do you understand? A bad visitor wants to go sleep, and that doggie making mess? Visitor‘s gonna give you big kick.

Me to my dog at 3:45am as she barks in the night like a fool

The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage.

Thucydides

I am led to religion because twinkle from surroundings is not constant.

Remember, we are still in the 6th day.

The Holocaust reminds America of its calling, Europe of its fragility.

Alain Finkielkraut

Two great modern inventions are the rock concert and the rollercoaster, for with them returned to earth the sound of women screaming en masse in glee and worship.

I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything I thought it could be.

Peter Gibbons

Please don’t shouldify every entertainment.

What Brando did for the cinema and Elvis did for music, Shatner did for the small screen.

Mark Simpson

The novel’s success lies in its own sensitiveness.

E. M. Forster

You know “that look” women get when they want sex? Me neither.

Steve Martin

There seems to be something in the cheesy romanticism of Latin American culture that really appeals to Russians.

John Dolan

Magic and all that is ascribed to it isa deep presentiment of the powers of science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To paraphrase what Lincoln said about slavery, if cruelty to animals is not wrong then nothing is wrong.

Larry Hansen

In a modern, liberal society, religious observance does not “take away” choice. It is a choice.

Virginia Postrel

A gifted mimic, he nonetheless eschews regional accents for comic effect.

Dean Allen, creator of Textile, on himself

The center of moral gravity in world politics has decisively moved from the cause of greater equality in the rich countries to that of greater opportunity in the poor ones.

Walter Russell Mead

We used to choose which stories to read in our newspaper. Now we choose the newspapers in which to read our story.

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

Douglas Adams

We like to do things together even though I think she’s a stupid cunt.

Aaron Livingstone

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

Without the fear of God and the love of the republic, all we have to check our behavior is the fear of the police.

Walter Russell Mead

Enjoys giving paprika.

Irit Levy (by mistake)

If you foolishly ignore beauty, you’ll soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

The invariable mark of wisdom isto see the miraculous in the common.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think humor delineates who your friends really are.

Crispin Glover

Life is not a burden, but we make it one when we refuse to accept things as they are.

Baba Hari Dass

A successful nation has to be, to one degree or another, a romance.

Mark Steyn

There’s just something about moving, breathing and sweating. It’s like God’s reset button.

Jonathan Fields

Design is the expression of style, style of philosophy.

Only artists can fully audience.

Don’t scorn fashion, for ‘tis the celebration of the age, and what else is one to do with one’s time?

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Design: the marriage of ergonomics and aesthetics.

The opponents of homosexual marriage feel much more strongly about the issue than the supporters.

Richard A. Posner

The term “law of nature” illustrates just how young — and perhaps still fragile — science is.

The United States is too big a country, too important a country, too gracious a country to have permanent enemies.

Condoleezza Rice

The natural world, rightly studied, unlocks the soul, and the soul, once opened, yields truths about the moral structure of the universe.

Michael Knox Beran

To map between dissimilar data structures, a more powerful data representation is needed.

James Hendler

Some loathsome facsimile of integrity won’t let me have sex in dreams if I’m not having any in life.

Without all the frills, the human body is quite economical to operate.

Ray Jardine

To be pro-Israel is to be pro-hope.

Walter Russell Mead

Vinegar, the conservative preservative.

Judgments are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

Marshall Rosenberg

The sedentary life… is the real sin against the holy spirit.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I can’t live in a place where dogs require leashes. On the other hand, I need to be within walking distance of a cafe.

Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis.

Mark Steyn channelling Barak Obama

Not even Friday afternoons can offer sanctuary from dangerous or ill-considered policy choices.

Karl Rove, on the Obama Administration

Your rash is your bowels and your bowels is your rash.

Juan Carlos Bronstein

Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships.

J. Cerone

I prefer you farting than saying these stupid things.

It’s OK to have a thought without writing it down.

In content metadata and hierarchies… you will often find a goldmine of implicit and explicit data that you can leverage to creatively contextualize content.

Christian Ricci

Depression is cancer of the thought.

All orthodoxies believe that if you do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, you will probably end up in possession of the right frame of mind.

Irving Kristol

The golden ratio, that is old-fashioned.

Stephen James

As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.

Jacques Chirac, President of France

If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.

Andrew O’Hagan

The teenager is a problem of over-gregarious life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

A man commonly saunters a little in turning from one sort of employment to another.

Adam Smith

Gentile ethics entails ought implies can, while in Jewish ethics can implies don’t.

Sidney Morgenbesser

The biggest tragedy is muteness.

The interest of tone is the interest of manners, and the interest of manners is the interest of morals, and the interest of morals is the interest of civilization.

Henry James

Look out for 1957 week.

BBC4

People get raped everywhere by every kind of person.

Ronit Sela

How am I not myself?

Brad Stand

Environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

A smile is a valium beam.

Aaron Livingstone

First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.

David Brooks

Happier is the man who has introduced his mind’s oral fixation to his body’s need of water.

Any fool can fast, but it takes a wise man to break a fast properly.

George Bernard Shaw

An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.

Paul Graham

Problems which bring solutions often bring about your best material.

Douglas Adams

In the gospel of America, there are no permanent conflicts.

David Brooks

The religious orthodox credo: think not lest ye be thunk about.

So Charlie looked away, too, and tried to buck himself up by considering the glories of his surroundings.

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Low-density sprawl is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy.

Richard Florida

We are that part of creation that seeks to know all creation.

George W. Bush

The isolationism of the Left stems from the conviction that America is bad for the rest of the world, whereas the isolationism of the Right is based on the belief that the rest of the world is bad for America.

Norman Podhoretz

When the need arises – and it does – you must be able to shoot your own dog.

Robert A. Heinlein

Long before Israel resembled America, America resembled Israel.

David Gelernter

Let’s start calling it genderism and come up with a more exciting meaning for sexism.

Five minutes ahead of schedule. Right on schedule.

Dwight Schrute

It’s good consolation to know that good times passed were actively and consistently recognized at the time to be good.

If your work really is your life, and that things like friendship, and language, and travel, and bohemia are also the work, then you really are lucky.

Christopher Hitchens

I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.

Ram Dass

Israel has no business not being in the Sinai.

There’s nothing here but volcanoes.

Bond-san

Is there any pleasure like sitting comfortably in Israel’s hills, a book open by an American, and meditating on England?

If you are a native of the rainforest you learn to distinguish many sorts of leaves. We learn to distingush many different typefaces.

Virginia Postrel

The difference between the judgment of a great critic and that of a semi-literate censorious fool lies in its range of inferred or cited reference, in the lucidity and rhetorical strength of articulation or in the accidental addendum which is that of a critic who is a creator in his own right.

George Steiner

The most permanent, secure, and durable thing we can possess is a foolproof way to deal with impermanence, insecurity, and surprise.

David Allen (Making it All Work, p13)

At least things aren’t going so well that I need fear, “From good fortune, disaster.”

The march towards self-determination can only be embarked on by a people with democratic aspirations and goals.

Edward Said, 1993

Marxism is shit, the last of Christian shit.

Salvador Dali

They are lost who ask whether animals have souls, for all animals do — except arguably men, grown with language.

Everything you’re doing I’m doing in heels.

Claire Foster, Date Night

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Paul Graham

The most democratic and fair way of choosing candidates is by committee.

Avigdor Lieberman

If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers’ and notaries’ offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions,—it will appear as if one man had made it all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tears are the water that nourishes life after loss.

Sherri Mandell

Labour, it must always be remembered, and not any particular commodity, or set of commodities, is the real measure of the value both of silver and of all other commodities.

Adam Smith

It has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t follow that it has a right to defend itself by force.

Cunning linguist Noam Chomsky, on Israel

But men are better than theirtheology.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truest religion is a language.

Money isn’t really a reason to do anything— it’s a reason not to do things, but it’s never a reason to do something.

Irvine Welsh

Instead of doing the right thing, I will try to say it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What’s good for Israel is good for the world.

A yoga day never dips below 7 and is usually an 8.

If I rise before 6am it’s hard to be depressed, whereas if I rise after 10am it’s hard to be relaxed.

It don’t mean a pittance if it ain’t got that resonance.

Whereas Western medicine may heroically rescue us, Chinese medicine can protect and preserve our health day to day.

tcmadvisory.com

Sauna:drug-free altered-state pod.

We need only live enough to write the rest convincingly.

Like many rationalists, I’m a Pisces.

Robin Ince

Myths rely on truth for their power.

National Geographic

I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.

Tom Clancy

The only character to appear in all four Python films (And Now for Something Completely Different, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Meaning of Life and Life of Brian) is God.

My ambition for many years was to be involved in work that was utterly compelling to me, regardless of the consequences.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Invert, always invert.

Charlie Munger

Pragmatism works in theory but not in practice.

Sidney Morgenbesser

One of the few benefits of being a journalist is that you’re not in the Army.

P. J. O’Rourke

Momentum has its own momentum.

The difference is psychological tricks.

I still can’t decide which is simpler: a single wall interrupted by a door, which is arguably three things, or a door next to a wall, which is definitely two.

Outdoors, hat on; indoors, shoes off.

Regarding terrorists, one cannot be both a murderer and a martyr.

There is no glamour without solitude.

We can’t have chaps walking around saying Muslims are violent because they’ll go bananas and smash the place up.

Mark Steyn

Lordy, I’m such a pagan.

Chokae Kalekoa

Only my sickness brought me to reason.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Parsley—a cure for burn?

Space is the breath of art.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Occasionally you may have to go to a hospital or to a restaurant.

Barbara Woodhouse, No Bad Dogs

Keep the cave.

Sit as little as possible.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The quickest way to still the mind is to move the body.

The key characteristic of the logic of strategy is that it’s paradoxical and contradictory right through.

Edward Luttwak

The sage seeks wisdom for his heart; the artist seeks wisdom for others’.

It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.

Jule Styne

Be not weary in well doing, for in due time you will reap, if you faint not.

Gal.6:9

Work is more fun than fun.

Noel Coward

I like what the Middle East has become. The inevitabilities are being processed and Iran is more isolated than ever.

Thomas PM Barnett

It’s hope so there’s got to be some truthfulness to it.

Aaron Livingstone

To attempt to impose European-style centralized government on a third of a billion people from Maine to Hawaii is to invite failure on a scale unknown to history.

Mark Steyn

Fine line it is between Yoda and Gollum.

Florence is going to Paris.

Home is not where you live; it’s where your friends are.

Jeremy Clarkson

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

Gandhi

man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marketing is about values.

Steve Jobs

I’m not passing the buck; this is someone else’s decision.

David Brent

If extraterrestrial lifeforms visited our world and said,“Show us the song of your people,” this would be that song.

cathoman7, on “Bohemian Rhapsody”

Even though I was glad to get out of those areas I still have a soft spot for them.

Tim Burton

A deep and intimate relationship with the security forces of the new Iraqi state is likely to be a significant asset for American foreign policy well into the future.

Walter Russell Mead

In fairy tales we get three wishes. In life we get one and it gets the rest.

Balance, that’s the secret. Moderate extremism.

There actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

O, reason not the need!

Lear

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am especially leery when people who loudly and implausibly assert that anti-Semitism isn’t a problem anymore make harsh and unbalanced criticisms about the world’s only Jewish state.

Walter Russell Mead

I couldn’t think of anything worse. Though it could be good fun.

Aaron Livingstone

We’ve been waiting millennia for film.

Alexander Payne

The very expression ‘scientifically proven’ is a contradiction in terms.

Carlo Rovelli

We have such exorbitant eyes that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve…

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read assuperior beings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am less and less capable of intellectual engagement with contemporary fiction because I feel like I’ve been had when I do so: the very process of literary analysis legitimizes a body of work that I feel is unworthy of such attention.

Dale Peck

Being an artist allows one to pay tribute to the things one loves.

It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you.

Paul Graham

The English feel a special sympathy for folly committed in the name of loyalty to an utterly outmoded code of conduct.

Julian Evans

Trust your own maps with your life.

Whistling is musical onanism.

James Lileks

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

Clay Shirky

The further away you are from the Lonely Planet-clutching swarms of Israelis the more fun you will have.

Englishman Alistair Humphreys, on biking around the world

Life is comprised of sevens, and there aren’t that many of them.

At the end of the day you have to do what’s right, and it was either living with myself or being happy.

Michael Scott

The great secret of education is to use exercise of mind and body as relaxation one to the other.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile)

Marriage makes or mars our whole life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

With the advent of Israel, anti-Semitism is more detrimental to its practitioners than to Jews.

We are our Archives.

Will Femia

The best thing about New York is that the best thing about New York is its people.

The fridge is cool.

How much social capital America gains by its religion of enfranchisement; how stupid can peoples be to ignore this?

No other animal on earth could do this. Maybe beavers. But not like this.

Dwight Schrute, in a garbage dump

Only artists, and especially those of the theater, have… taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes… Perhaps one should concede a similar merit to the religion that made men see the sinfulness of every single individual through a magnifying glass.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Writers should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.

Anton Chekhov

If you need a horoscope to tell the future, you HAVE no future.

Jim Goad

Ah, the persuasiveness of wretchedness.

The daily activities most associated with happiness are having sex, socializing after work and having dinner. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting.

David Brooks

I shun father and mother and wife and brother whenmy genius calls me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Civilization… is the conscious forefront of evolution.

Edward Abbey

Glamour is to life as life is to everything else.

The trick is acquiring humility without having become wretched.

You only have to discipline yourself long enough to change your standards.

David Allen

Order means delight.

The duel ruins it because all of a sudden Scaramanga seems like an idiot.

John Gruber, on The Man with the Golden Gun

Calling something evil is to say that it is one’s duty to eradicate it.

You’re diminutive, for sure.

Brian Greben, to me

If past experience holds true, I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

David Foster Wallace

That is the best part of each writer which has nothingprivate in it; that which he does not know; that which flowed out of his constitution and not from his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many you would abstract as the spirit of them all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The essence of Zionism is to meet destruction with construction.

{Disarmed} A great man is always willing to be little.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All literature writes the character of the wise man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You should” is the rudest.

Web folk—the least experienced designers out there—are taking on some of the most difficult design challenges.

Unknown

Equal distribution of libidinous drives between homo- and heterosexuality does not exist, simply because homosexuality is not a drive but a defense mechanism.

Edmund Bergler

One of the world’s really important divides lies between nations that react well to accidents and nations that do not.

William Langewiesche

Most people will play-act in order to get what they want. But all I want is freedom from ever having to play-act.

Jim Goad

A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.

Napoleon Hill

Obama’s mispronunciation [of “corpsman”] is a pithier summation of the State of the Union than any of the dreary 90-minute sludge he paid his speechwriters for.

Mark Steyn

It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.

Clayton M. Christensen

The Protestant faith: success is evidence of integrity.

In the woods, is perpetual youth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wonderful, wonderful person. That was my son.

Jer Bulsara, on Freddie Mercury

My feeling about the so-called occupied territories is that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict.

Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence

To know and feel what is good and right for you—that alone is princely.

There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income.

Michael Lewis

Somehow I must get the elements of my soul locked into proper position so that I, as the world, am in good and proper relations with the world.

Let us not forget that nature is utterly monstrous.

The Turk is proud of his German; the German of his English; and the English-speaker of his French.

Make dinner before lunch.

Let the day end.

The most unromantic thing is to accuse someone of being unromantic.

He was judged by the color of his skin rather than the content of his character.

Spengler, on Obama’s inauguration

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

Paul Graham

Go out of the house to see the moon, and ‘tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.

Literature is an act of revenge that aspires to elegy.

Dale Peck

Britain, with Charlies Darwin and Adam Smith, gives us at long last not narrative but algorithmic cosmology and sociology.

Where God speaks, the Tao is sexy.

Success is due generally to discipline, which is merely action leavened with order.

It’s not being I get sick and tired of, not at all; it’s my thoughts.

I don’t build a house without predicting the end of the present social order.

Frank Lloyd Wright

We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He took his work for granted and so he succeeded at it.

Norman Mailer

Editing is the natural place of man.

Alexander Payne

England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England I should not find if I should go to the island to seek it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.

David Gelertner

In the age of the global village James Bond is the chivalrous knight about town.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; tGive me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

My biggest expense? Not billing.

When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way.

Peggy Noonan

What is the pitiable chatter of American flat- and muddle-heads to me?

Friedrich Nietzsche

To joy, via habituated glee. Or to glee, via habituated joy?

One nefarious invention is the tweezers, good only for perpetuating bad habits.

Lettuce become thy pita;spinach thy mince; cucumber thy cracker.

Life is surely best as discoveries of new things to love. Socratic or not?

If I’m facing a choice, I always know I’m standing in the wrong place.

Ram Dass

Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.

Billy Crystal

If land for peace seems a wrongheaded policy for a large country, it is obviously far more so for a small one.

Manhood first, and then gentleness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do I not know what to do?

More is often more.

Hal Prince

Entertainment is denial.

Perhaps the mistake we make is to continue to regard them as an Anglo Saxon people. That blood is very much watered down now; they are a Latin-Slav mixture, with a fair amount of German and Irish. They are impatient, mercurial, panicky.

Harold Macmillan, on Americans

Once I’ve spoken the spell is broken.

Always carry treats.

The intensity of a memory is generally determined by the people one’s with.

It is now anachronistic to sport no anachronisms.

In comedy you are the joke whilst over in tragedy the joke is on you.

In advanced societies, thinking that tea, coffee, alcohol, and manufactured beverages are desirable for the purely natural water needs of the daily “stressed” body is an elementary but catastrophic mistake.

Fereydoon Batmanghelidj

I feel like another joint while doing it, but I know that it makes me dry and bleary as well as sensuous and special.

Jewish Prayer and Torah study are the yin and yang of religious life.

Rabbi Maurice Lamm

The legacy of liberal individualism is the restoration of the very absolutism that it originally sought to overthrow—a philosophical tragedy.

Phillip Blond

Spontaneity requires the trampoline of a plan.

Rejoice your vocabulary!

Aaron Livingstone

The two classic errors in predicting the future of a technology shift are to overestimate its short-term impact and underestimate its long-term impact.

Unknown

I know the feeling of the Jew who leaves these dungeons—and breathes the air of Jerusalem. He feels at home, he feels safe, feels the terrible difference between one who lives in his country, his homeland, in a country which is capable of defending his life — to one who stood alone, defenseless against bestial men.

Ariel Sharon

It must suck not to have lips.

Lee Fisher, on dogs

Success: when the current book I’m reading can express the essence of the previous.