“Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together…and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters…. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.”

"Mother Earth Mother Board," cover story in Wired, 4.12 (1996)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sph…" by Neal Stephenson?

Neal Stephenson167

American science fiction writer 1959

Related quotes

“How does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoe, open their motorcar doors?”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew in the Parliament of Malaysia, 1965 http://maddruid.com/?p=645 <br class="br">1960s

“If you will observe, it doesn’t take
A man of giant mould to make
A giant shadow on the wall;
And he who in our daily sight
Seems but a figure mean and small,
Outlined in Fame’s illusive light,
May stalk, a silhouette sublime,
Across the canvas of his time.”

John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916) American author

Authors’ Night.

“When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Quitte-t-on sa maîtresse, on risque, hélas! d'être trompé deux ou trois fois par jour.
Vol. I, ch. XII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

“Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Part 6 "Beyond System — The Ultimate Source of Jeet Kune Do"
Jeet Kune Do (1997)

“The two greatest blinders of the intellectual who today might fight against the main drift are new and fascinating career chances, which often involve opportunities to practice his skill rather freely, and the ideology of liberalism, which tends to expropriate his chance to think straight. The two go together, for the liberal ideology, as now used by intellectuals, acts as a device whereby he can take advantage of the new career chances but retain the illusion that his soul remains his own.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

The New Men of Power (1948), p. 281.
1940s

“There was once a young man of Oporta,
Who daily got shorter and shorter,
The reason he said
Was the hod on his head
Which was filled with the heaviest mortar.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Melodies No. 3
Useful and Instructive Poetry (1845)

“When I was younger and really busy, I think I did lose sight of who exactly I was. Mental wellbeing is something that is so important in any career but in acting in particular. That’s why friendship and family is so important to me.”

Russell Tovey (1981) British actor

Said in an interview with the Guardian. Russell Tovey: ‘When I started having sex I panicked because I didn’t feel old enough’ https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/11/russell-tovey-when-i-started-having-sex-i-panicked-because-i-didnt-feel-old-enough (11 March 2018)

“Of all kind of authors there are none I despise more than compilers, who search every where for shreds of other men's works, which they join to their own, like so many pieces of green turf in a garden: they are not at all superior to compositors in a printing house, who range the types, which, collected together, make a book, towards which they contribute nothing but the labours of the hand. I would have original writers respected, and it seems to me a kind of profanation to take those pieces from the sanctuary in which they reside, and to expose them to a contempt they do not deserve. When a man hath nothing new to say, why does not he hold his tongue? What business have we with this double employment?”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

No. 66.
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

“Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Darwin Among the Machines
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part III - The Germs of Erewhon and of Life and Habit
Context: Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

“[We may view the] economic organization as a system of prize relations. Seen in the large, free enterprise is an organization of production and distribution in which individuals or family units get their real income, their "living," by selling productive power for money to "business units" or "enterprises", and buying with the money income thus obtained the direct goods and services which they consume. This view, it will be remembered, ignores for the sake of simplicity the fact that an appreciable fraction of the productive power in use at any time is not really employed in satisfying current wants but to make provision for increased want-satisfaction in the future; it treats society as it would be, or would tend to become, with progress absent, or in a “static” state.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: The Economic Organization, 1933., p.59-60; on the circular-flow of income and the circular-flow diagram.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Neal Stephenson167

Related quotes

Related topics