“I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.”

— Al Capone

As quoted in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) by Dale Carnegie, p. 26

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Al Capone 44

American gangster 1899–1947

Bill Nelson

After the February 14, 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, on February 15, 2018 on the floor of the United States Senate ([Marc, Fisher, w:Marc Fisher, February 15, 2018, September 6, 2018, The Washington Post, The AR-15: ‘America’s rifle’ or illegitimate killing machine?, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-ar-15-americas-rifle-or-illegitimate-killing-machine/2018/02/15/743e66ca-1266-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html]; [USA Today, Florida shooting suspect bought gun legally, authorities say, Bart, Jansen, February 15, 2018, August 22, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/15/florida-shooting-suspect-bought-gun-legally-authorities-say/340606002/]; [Florida Senators on Parkland School Shooting, February 15, 2018, C-SPAN, August 22, 2018, https://www.c-span.org/video/?441042-15/florida-senators-parkland-school-shooting]; [BBC, FL senator: 'AR-15 is not for hunting, it’s for killing', February 15, 2018, August 22, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-43066528]) and in an interview on Fox News' Fox & Friends ([AR-15s are not the problem, manufacturers say after rifle-wielding teenage gunman kills 17 people at Florida school, Kevin, Breuninger, February 15, 2018, August 22, 2018, CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/15/ar-15s-not-the-problem-rifle-manufacturers-say-after-school-shooting.html]) and the next day in an appearance in Parkland ([VERBATIM: 'An AR-15 is not for hunting, it's for killing', Reuters, February 16, 2018, August 22, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/video/2018/02/16/verbatim-an-ar-15-is-not-for-hunting-its?videoId=401778248]; ['An AR-15 Is for Killing': Sen. Nelson Hopes FL Shooting Is the 'Turning Point' on Gun Control, Fox News, February 16, 2018, August 22, 2018, http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/02/16/bill-nelson-florida-school-shooting-could-be-turning-point-gun-control]).

“I've had a good life…. I have managed to do all I could wish for --even be a government servant. Now I feel whatever time I have left should be spent doing what I like best -- writing plays.”

Girish Raghunath Karnad (1938–2019) Indian playwright

Renaissance Man, 24 November 2013, India Today http://www.india-today.com/itoday/12041999/arts.html,

“It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.”

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989) English philosopher

As quoted in The Observer (17 August 1986).

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

“I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and others don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to — that I wrote for myself — seem to do the best of all.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"'A Conversation With Lois McMaster Bujold", p. 54
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)

“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

that does not occur to them.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 36e

“For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

Flowering Judas, Introduction to Modern Library edition (1940)
Context: For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.