“In February, the door of his English class opened and a toad in a red cape walked in. Grublike face. Pasty sheen, sparse hair. A round of snickers. The little man swirled the cape off his shoulders, wrote Denton Thrasher on the chalkboard. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them, his face was […]
“‘Perhaps the savages will always be in control,’ Philip said gloomily. ‘Perhaps greed will always outweigh wisdom in the councils of the mighty; perhaps fear will always overcome compassion in the mind of a man with a sword in his hand.’” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 15284
“A man is always better off for understanding something!” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 12550
“She walked along the southern side aisle, dragging her hand along the wall, feeling the rough texture of the stones, running her fingernails over the shallow grooves made by the stonemason’s toothed chisel. Here in the aisles, under the windows, the wall was decorated with blind arcading, like a row of filled-in arches. The arcading […]
“The most expensive part of a building is the mistakes.” ––The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, loc. 9609 “Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering […]
There was a time when I thought Michael V. Hayden and his ilk were scum, but, as Hayden himself acknowledges: “You can only dehumanize an enemy from a distance” (238). Once I let Hayden into my head, he gave my liberal, civilian ass a serious reality check. Despite its nonlinear format and a bevy of […]
“As he walked past the ruins, the prospect of building a new cathedral suddenly seemed daunting: all that stone, all that timber, all those craftsmen, all those years. He would have to control it all, make sure there was a steady supply of materials, monitor the quality of timber and stone, hire and fire men, […]
“Good people overcome imperfect structures. That’s usually not the formula for success recommended by management treatises, but in the real world of complex and important enterprises, it is sometimes the best we can do.” ––Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden, pg. 178
“In September 2005, following the London Tube bombings, Manningham-Buller (now chief of MI5) advocated that ‘there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of civil liberties we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives.’ I realized later […]
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so annoyed by a book that taught me so much. Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations is, in some ways, exactly what it claims to be––a guide for creating organizations with internal dynamics that radically diverge from prevailing models. But it’s also a highly repetitive text with a lot of fuzzy […]