
St. 6
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odec (written 1742–1750)
XIV : pity this busy monster, manunkind
1 x 1 (1944)
St. 6
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odec (written 1742–1750)
Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 13, p. 254–255
Context: It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it. So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers.
As quoted in "The Unstoppable Michael Douglas" in The Christian Science Monitor (15 October 1996) https://www.csmonitor.com/1996/1015/101596.feat.film.1.html
L'Ami du peuple, vol. 5 (1791-04-04), pp. 2649-50
“Victims take pity on victims.”
Se apiadan de las víctimas, las víctimas.
Voces (1943)
Rogers Commission Report (1986)
Context: The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood. They did not occur equally on all flights and all joints; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, still more leading to catastrophe?
In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the "success" of previous flights.
“You seek up a big monster for him to fight your wars for you.”
Seek Up
Remember Two Things (1993)
To his young son from the Yosemite Valley on (28 August 1989)
1920s, The Letters of William James (1920)