Quotes about investment
page 5

“[…] France […] too had invested heavily in the Congress establishment and in the skewed advice of its so-called India experts.”

Swapan Dasgupta (1955) Indian politician, journalist and columnist

"A mighty fall from a moral high ground", 2014

“For Luther judgment was a real problem, because everyone gets off on judgment, according to Luther. In fact you have to put a restraining order, a gag order, on those, and that's everyone, who want to judge everyone and everything at top speed. So that when you have a rush to judgment, … it's also the rush of judgment. … I'd like us to consider the libidinal investment that Luther sees in judgment and legislates against.”

Avital Ronell (1952) American philosopher

"Kafka's Before the Law: The Law of the Father http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifz0m9PBD9E" (2011) 13:10

Problem, Speed

“Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 28

“Disarmament for Development is a win-win strategy for States and Peoples. It is time to reduce the spiral of military expenditures and to invest in research into the root causes of conflicts and in the development of strategies of conflict-prevention and resolution.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2014
Source: Disarm and develop – UN expert urges win-win proposition for States and peoples

People, Time

“Our economy has been at risk by investment schemes aimed at making not just a few, but many extra dollars, and we need to start insisting on the right rules and transparency so this doesn't happen again.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

December 5, 2007
Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

“I have no ego investment in being on the air. I don't knock others for whom that kind of attention is like oxygen, but I don't miss anything about it.”

Hugh Downs (1921) American broadcaster

Attributed

“Figure 12-6 pulls together in a simplified way the main elements of income determination. Without saving and investment, there would be a circular flow of income between business and the public: above, business pays out wages, interest, rents, and profits to the public in return for the services of labor and property; and below, the public pays consumption dollars to business in return for goods and services.
Realistically, we must recognize that the public will wish to save some of its income, as shown at the spigot Z. Hence, businesses cannot expect their consumption sales to be as large as the total of wages, interest, rents, and profits.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

8th ed., 1970, p. 218
1940s, Economics (1948-)

Way, Business

“Human beings are an exception to many general rules in biology. In many species, female mate choice alone is important; in our species, male mate choice is important as well. In many species, males alone are showy and ornamented; in our species, females are as well. In many species, males alone compete for mates; in our species, females compete as well. In many species, males invest nothing other than sperm in their offspring; in our species, men typically invest a great deal. Not only are human beings exceptional in these ways, but they all tie together into a cohesive story.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 144

Men, Way

“In the course of waging that war, the people of Canada had shown that it was possible for them to maintain nearly a million men in uniform and at the same time expand all the facilities for production within Canada at an unprecedented speed, including building industries which had never existed in Canada before… and by and large the cost of production in Canada compared favourable with the cost of production anywhere else among the Allies… All of this was accomplished without any foreign investment, without and foreign loans… We were quite capable of self-development.”

Tim Buck (1891–1973) Canadian politician

Tim Buck A Conscience for Canada

Men, War, People, Time

“There is ample work for all in this country provided all will work. The problem of unemployment is aggravated, not wholly by the alien knocking at our gate, but by the laborer at home slamming the door of production behind him and walking out. Stopping industry will not right the matter. And in the last analysis it is the earnings of industry, which on the average are only fair, that provide alike for wages and the increase of investment on which is the sole dependence of the advance of civilization.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Home, Problem, Dependency, Country

“We are blessed with a faith, which calls into action the whole intellectual man; which prescribes a reasonable service; which challenges the investigation of its evidences; and which, in the doctrine of immortality, invests the mind of man with a portion of the dignity of Divine intelligence.”

Edward Everett (1794–1865) American politician, orator, statesman

Edward Everett, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 140.

Faith, Intelligence

“The adverse impact on development productivity of requiring programmers to navigate along access paths to reach target data […] was enormous. In addition, it was not possible to make slight changes in the layout in storage without simultaneously having to revise all programs that relied on the previous structure. […] As a result, far too much manpower was being invested in continual (and avoidable) maintenance of application programs.”

E. F. Codd (1923–2003) computer scientist

Relational Database: A Practical Foundation for Productivity (1982)

Change

“Isn’t it desperately sad that, at a time when we face formidable problems – poverty, HIV/AIDS, conflict – that the Anglican Communion can invest so much energy on disagreements about human sexuality? A communion that used to boast that one of its distinctive characteristics was something called comprehensiveness, that our communion, the Anglican Church, included just about everybody. Even if you had the most weird theology you could come in, you were allowed. And now we, who used to be held up in admiration by many because of this inclusiveness, are now spending time working out how we can excommunicate one another. God looks on and God weeps. God weeps.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

"And God Smiles," sermon preached at All Saints Church, Pasadena, California (6 November 2005)

God, Sadness, Problem, Time

“We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Life, Hell

“I don't believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor abroad.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

"Bernie Sanders Speech On Democratic Socialism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8R6PgGcTw, (19 November 2015). 2010s, 2015

Family, Wealth

“The rex bite is unique among better known dinosaurs. Instead of inflicting a long, shallow wound, rex jaws would thrust a few crowns deep into bone armor, killing a Triceratops with a single blow. We see close-linked co-evolution here, a terminal Cretaceous arms race. Triceratops is the commonest horned dino of the time, the final dinosaurian Age, the Lancian. T’tops departs from the ceratopsian tradition of frill construction. Torosaurus, very rare during the Lancian Age of the Cretaceous, retains that basic design: the frill is composed of thin bone rods that make a frame, with huge holes in the middle. Triceratops fills in the holes with greatly thickened bone. Why would Triceratops invest in five times as much bone volume in its frill? Well…to me the answer is obvious. Because the commonest predator has evolved great, armor-penetrating teeth. The argument goes in the other direction – T. rex evolved swollen, tall tooth crowns to deal with the unusual protection of the commonest horned herbivore.”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

As quoted in Paleontological Profiles: Robert Bakker http://scienceblogs.com/laelaps/2008/04/07/paleontological-profiles-rober/, scienceblogs (April 7, 2008)

Age, Time

“The stress on 'human resources' as an organizational asset goes back at least to Drucker (1954). This was elaborated in the theory of 'human capital' by Schultz (1963) who was concerned to describe the benefits of education as a 'production good' enhancing the economic resources of society, and by others like Becker (1964) who argued for the benefits to economic growth of a well-trained workforce. While labour market segmentation theory developed in reaction (stressing institutional processes in labour market formation), human asset accounting in the 1970s applied the capital theory to quantifying investments in people by the organization (Flamholtz, 1974). This was embraced by some (for example, Likert, 1967) as a way of encouraging humane employment policies, less geared to the short-term”

Andrew Pettigrew (1944) University professor

although others saw in it the rule of accountants
Chris Hendry and Andrew Pettigrew. "Human resource management: an agenda for the 1990s." International journal of human resource management 1.1 (1990): 17-43.

People, Education, Way, Training

“They, economics and evolution, are both examples of a larger process, which has been at work in this part of the universe for a very long time. This is the process of the development of structures of increasing complexity and improbability. The evolutionary process always operates through mutation and selection and has involved some distinction between the genotype which mutates and the phenotype which is selected. The process by which the genotype constructs the phenotype may be described as "organization". Economic development manifesto itself largely in the production of commodities, that is, goods and services. It originates, however, in ideas, plans, and attitudes in the human mind. These are the genotypes in economic development. This whole process indeed can be described as a process in the growth of knowledge. What the economist calls "capital" is nothing more than human knowledge imposed on the material world. Knowledge and the growth of knowledge, therefore, is the essential key to economic development. Investment, financial systems and economic organizations and institutions are in a sense only the machinery by which a knowledge process is created and expressed.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1977) Economic Development as an Evolutionary System, Fifth World Congress of the International Economic Association, Tokyo, Aug.-Sept. 1977.
1970s

World, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“The notion that advertising was a sort of corporate luxury, to be indulged in where there are no demands left over, now seems archaic and quaint. Businessmen are increasingly inclined to view the appropriation as a true capital investment – as much so as a new plant.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 232

“Success in investing doesn't correlate with I. Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

As quoted in Homespun Wisdom from the "Oracle of Omaha" by Amy Stone in BusinessWeek (5 June 1999) http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_27/b3636006.htm

People, Intelligence, Success

“The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging. The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of the law.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

p, 125
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

Law

“The worst possible time to invest is when the skies are the clearest.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 2, Measuring The Beast, p. 66.

Time

“To gain profit is important, but you must invest to build up assets that you can cash in in the future.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 157.

Future

“Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

CD-ROM marking 25th anniversary of Bain & Company, quoted in * 2012-09-27
Corn
David
w:David Corn
New Romney Video: In 1985, He Said Bain Would "Harvest" Companies for Profits
Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/1985-romney-bain-harvest-firms-profits-video
2012-10-03
1985

Partnership

“Perhaps the biggest appreciation adjustment we need is toward the millions of men and women we call stepparents. We have taken for granted especially the stepparents who are raising no children of their own, and receiving no income from a significant other, but who have nevertheless chosen to invest love, time and money in children.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 246.

Love, Women, Men, Money

“To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.”

Alex Steffen (1968) American writer and futurist

The GOOD Guide to COP15: The Fire this Time: Copenhagen and the War for the Future, 18 November 2009 http://www.good.is/post/The-GOOD-Guide-to-COP15-The-Fire-this-Time-Copenhagen-and-the-War-for-the-Future/,

Men, Future

“My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Pt. VIII, ch. 19
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life, Understanding

“The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter I-V, Chapter V.

Love, Idea, Understanding, Nature

“Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.”

Walter Scott book The Talisman

The Talisman (1825), Ch. 24.

Pleasure, Dogs, Nature

“…In the following year (AH 913, AD 1506), the king marched against Nurwur, a strong fort in the district of Malwa, then in possession of the Hindoos. The Prince Julal Khan governor of Kalpy, was directed to advance and invest the place; and should the Hindoos resist, he was required to inform the King… The King remained for the space of six months at Nurwur, breaking down temples, and building mosques. He also established a college there, and placed therein many holy and learned men.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Sikandar Lodî (AD 1489-1517) Narwar (Madhya Pradesh)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Men, Strong, Learning

“The challenge we face is how to integrate the Muslim world into the global economy. Asia has become part of it, but not Africa or the Middle East.One could realistically think about a Marshall Plan with respect to this part of the world, to succeed in integrating the Muslim and Arab world into the global economy as we did in Europe after World War II. For example, we’ve wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq war. Had we taken a third of this money and invested it into a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, the benefits would have been ten times more than wasting it on a war.”

Nouriel Roubini (1958) American economist

Quoted in Janera Soerel, "Talking to Nouriel Roubini," Janera (2007-05-02).

Money, War, World, Thinking

“Here is my recommendation for President Trump and the new Congress. Turn immediately to our glorious national institutions, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for a report to the nation on the key areas for science and technology investments in the coming generation. Ask them to recommend an organizational strategy for a science-based scaling up of national and global R&D efforts. Call on America’s research universities to add their own brainstorming to the work of the national academies. Later in 2017, the president and Congress should then meet in a joint session of Congress to set forth a new technology vision for the nation and an R&D strategy to achieve it.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

"Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable," w:Good Reads, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/53895656-building-the-new-american-economy-smart-fair-and-sustainable

Effort, Universe, Science

“This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 15
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

Parting

“Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Gavin Smith goes one-on-one with David Fincher (1999)

Love, People, Books, Reality

“If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” p. 45
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Art, Personality

“When we train men for war, we lose some part of every man we train -- even if we win the war. When we train men to be better nurturers, even men who fail the course will have won. And so will every child they ever meet. Training men to love is a nation’s best investment.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 112.

Love, Men, War, Parting

“There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation when saving is increasing without a corresponding increase of investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to a disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 46

“The Yankee invasion had come to England well heeled with American dollars. American privates earned three times as much as their British companions. A U. S. staff sergeant's take-home pay equaled that of a British captain. Since such a substantial share of this wealth was invested in local courting, it is no wonder that Britain's provincial customs were given a fancy whirl. Indeed, it is a tribute to the civility of the British that they endured us with such good will.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. 238.

Home, Time, Wealth

“Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons that it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control.”

Thomas C. Schelling (1921–2016) American economist

Nobel Prize lecture (2005)

“The other boys at Yale came from wealthy families, and none of them were investing outside the United States, and I thought, 'That is very egotistical. Why be so shortsighted or near-sighted as to focus only on America? Shouldn't you be more open-minded?”

John Marks Templeton (1912–2008) stock investor, businessman and philanthropist

The Quotable Sir John

Family, Boy

“Anyone got a few million they wanna throw away invest?”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=050927

“The investor has the benefit of the stock market's daily and changing appraisal of his holdings, for whatever that appraisal may be worth, and, second, that the investor is able to increase or decrease his investment at the market's daily figure—if he chooses. Thus the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options which he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 41

Quotes, Idea, Change

“These incidents will never break down our determination nor undermine our achievements. Rather, they should encourage all parties to draw the necessary lessons and never detract from the imperative to continue our work with determination and enthusiasm because the dignity and invulnerability of Tunisia are a burden which are invested all Tunisian men and women. Thank you for your attention.”

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1936–2019) Tunisian politician

Last speech to the Tunisian people by President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali before his resignation four days later, (January 2011). http://www.al-bab.com/arab/docs/tunisia/ben_ali_speech_10012011.htm

Women, Men, Drawing

“I am dying to find a way to invest in both North Korea and Myanmar. The major changes in these two countries are among the most exciting things I see right now, looking to the future.”

Jim Rogers (1942) American writer

Jim Rogers Octafinance Interview http://www.octafinance.com/jim-rogers-on-why-you-must-understand-china-and-what-after-north-and-south-korea-unite/27277/

Way, Change, Future, Country

“Tangibles trump conceptuals. Modern fiat currencies are generally accepted, but have essentially no backing. Because they are largely a by-product of interest-bearing debt, modern currencies are destined for inflation. In the long run, inflation dooms fiat currencies to collapse. The majority of your assets should be invested in productive farmland and other tangibles such as useful hand tools. After you have your key logistics squared away, anything extra should be invested in silver and gold.”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

Source: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Plume, New York (2009), p. 14

“Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent.”

Saki book Beasts and Super-Beasts

"The Dreamer"
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)

Life, World, Boy, Housing

“When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

[Szent-Györgyi, Albert, The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young, 1970, 20-21, The Universal Library Crosset & Dunlap, A National General Company, New York, https://archive.org/details/isbn_0448002566, July 24, 2017, Internet Archive]

Money, War, World, Way

“You have seized upon the most important of our social and political questions in the laws affecting the transfer of land. It is astonishing that the people at large are so tacit in their submission to the perpetuation of the feudal system in this country as it affects the property in land, so long after it has been shattered to pieces in every other country except Russia. The reason is, I suppose, that the great increase of our manufacturing system has given such an expansive system of employment to the population, that the want of land as a field of investment and employment for labour has been comparatively little felt. So long as this prosperity of our manufactures continues, there will be no great outcry against the landed monopoly. If adversity were to fall on the nation, your huge feudal properties would soon be broken up, and along with them the hereditary system of government under which contentedly live and thrive.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to James White, MP for Brighton (22 November 1857), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 679.
1850s

People, Law, Question, Country

“If the country is to flourish, capital must be invested in enterprise. But those who seek to draw upon other people's money must be wholly candid regarding the facts on which the investor's judgment is asked.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Statement on Signing the Securities Bill http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=14654 (27 May 1933) 1930s

Money, People, Drawing, Country

“Creativity requires risk. So do exploration and innovation. Anyone who thinks outside of the box is taking a risk. Leadership brings many risk. Courage is exercised in the face of risk. Invest involve risk. Decision-making always mean a certain degree of risk.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 161

Exercises, Courage, Thinking, Decision

“Apple's emphasis on short term greed instead of long-term investment will end up hurting the company and its shareholders and customers over the long haul. … What Apple does not seem to understand … is the fate that almost all niche platform providers eventually succumb to — gradual loss of influence, power, and profitability, followed by irrelevance.”

Henry Blodget (1966) American equity research analyst

Apple Is Being Shortsighted — And This Could Clobber The Company http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-being-greedy-2013-9 in Business Insider (12 September 2013)

Fate, Understanding, Loss, Hurt

“If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I'd be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

As quoted in "Wisdom from the 'Oracle of Omaha'" by Amy Stone in BusinessWeek (5 June 1999)

Money, Thinking, Hurt

“Looking backward on a period which is finished, we are looking at actually realized returns, costs, etc., as those items are registered in the bookkeeping of business. In such an ex post calculation there is, as we will show later, an exact balance between the invested waiting and the value of gross investment [Phil: he appears to mean savings and investment]. Looking forward there is no such balance except under certain conditions which remain to be ascertained. In the ex ante calculus it is a question not of realized results but of anticipations, calculations, and plans driving the dynamic process forward. Had this distinction been kept in mind, much confusion about “saving and investment” would have been avoided. There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation in which saving is increasing without a corresponding increase in investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 34

Question, Business, Appearance, Waiting

“When the Morgan and Rockefeller interests harmonized to consummate the great wrong, they well understood that they could not achieve their purpose against a hostile press. Hence they "took over" the newspapers.
This does not necessarily mean the ownership of all newspapers. The perfection of the modern combination is little less than a Fine Art. Here again control is better than outright ownership. And control can be achieved through that community of interests, that interdependence of investment and credits which ties the publisher up to the banks, the advertisers, and special interests.”

Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician

"Fooling the People as a Fine Art", La Follette's Magazine (April 1918)

Hostility, Art, Communication, Perfection

“The Christian insistence on freedom — the monastic vows are voluntary sacrifices of a select few — derives from the Christian concept that man must be free in order to act morally. (A sleeping, a chained and clubbed, a drugged person can neither be sinful nor virtuous.) Yet, the free world which is practically synonymous with the world of free enterprise alone provides a climate, a way of life compatible with the dignity of man who makes free decisions, enjoys privileges, assumes responsiblilties, and develops his talents as he sees fit. He is truly the steward of his family. He can buy, sell, save, invest, gamble, plan the future, build, retrench, acquire capital, make donations, take risks. In other words, he can be the master of his economic fate and act as a man instead of a sheep in a herd under a shepherd and his dogs. No doubt, free enterprise is a harsh system; it demands real men. But socialism, which appeals to envious people craving for security and afraid to decide for themselves, impairs human dignity and crushes man utterly.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

The Roots of Anticapitalism

Life, Men, Fate, People

“It was the custom when men received nominations to come to me for contributions, and I made them and considered them good paying investments for the company. In a Republican district I was a strong Republican; in a Democratic district I was Democratic, and in doubtful districts I was doubtful. In politics I was an Erie Railroad man all the time.”

Jay Gould (1836–1892) American businessman

Jay Gould : A Character Sketch (1893)

Men, Strong, Time

“Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).

Truth, Art, Literature, Understanding

“O ye who are invested with the Bayán! Regard not yourselves as being like unto the people to whom the Qur’án or the Gospel or other Scriptures of old were given, since at the time of His manifestation ye shall stray farther from God than did they. If ye happen to shut yourselves out it would never cross your minds that ye were shut out from Him. It behooveth you to consider how the people unto whom the Qur’án was given were debarred from the Truth, for indeed ye will act in a like manner, thinking that ye are doers of good. If ye perceive the degree of your deprivation of God, ye will wish to have perished from the face of the earth and to have sunk into oblivion. The day will come when ye will earnestly desire to know that which would meet with the good-pleasure of God but, alas, ye shall find no path unto Him. Ye, even as camels that wander aimlessly, will not find a pasture wherein ye may gather and unite upon a Cause in which ye can assuredly believe. At that time God shall cause the Sun of Truth to shine forth and the oceans of His bounty and grace to surge, while ye will have chosen droplets of water as the object of your desire, and will have deprived yourselves of the plenteous waters in His oceans.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVI, 13
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God, People, Pleasure, Truth

“Like it or not, giant, vertically integrated corporate enterprises were the most efficient means of organizing the production and distribution of mass produced goods and services. Bringing together supply chains, production processes, and distribution channels in vertically integrated companies under centralized management dramatically reduced transaction costs, increased efficiencies and productivity, lowered the marginal cost of production and distribution, and, for the most part, lowered the price of goods and services to consumers, allowing the economy to flourish. While those at the top of the corporate pyramid disproportionately benefited from the increasing returns on investment, it’s only fair to acknowledge that the lives of millions of consumers also improved appreciably in industrialized nations.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

Parting

“In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.”

Hermann Hesse book Peter Camenzind

Variant translation: In the beginning was the myth. Just as the great god composed and struggled for expression in the souls of the Indians, the Greeks and Germanic peoples, so to it continues to compose daily in the soul of every child.
Peter Camenzind (1904)

God, Soul, Search

“What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 24

Fools, Time

“Our efforts will only succeed if the Arabs and Turks step up in a much bigger way. This is their fight and they need to act like it. So far, however, Turkey has been more focused on the Kurds than on countering ISIS. And to be fair, Turkey has a long and painful history with Kurdish terrorist groups. But the threat from ISIS cannot wait. As difficult as it may be, we need to get Turkey to stop bombing Kurdish fighters in Syria who are battling ISIS and become a full partner of our coalition efforts against ISIS. The United States should also work with our Arab partners to get them more invested in the fight against ISIS. At the moment, they are focused in other areas.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Speech on fighting ISIS (November 20, 2015)

Pain, Way, History, Effort

“A corporate raid on a country is not foreign investment. It's just a corporate raid. A corporate raid doesn't expand our wealth, our employment, our exports, is not advantageous to most economies and most economies understand that. In New Zealand we did not. Everything that came from overseas was regarded as foreign investment, when, in fact, it was often a downsizing of the operation, a break-up of the operation and a mass of sackings.”

Winston Peters (1945) New Zealand politician

Interview with the 7:30 Report, ABC TV, Australia.

Understanding, Country, Wealth

“Say: All matters must be referred to the Book of God; I am indeed the First to believe in God and in His signs; I am the One Who divulgeth and proclaimeth the Truth and I have been invested with every excellent title of God, the Mighty, the Incomparable. Verily I have attained the Day of the First Manifestation and by the bidding of the Lord and as a token of His grace, I shall attain the Day of the Latter Manifestation”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Tablet to the First Letter of the Living

God, Truth, Books

“No nation would refuse to fight an invading army because some expert argued it would be cheaper to invest in defenses against future invasions. It is not a matter of prioritising lives now over lives tomorrow.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Address to the Pan Pacific HIV/AIDS Conference, Auckland, New Zealand, October 2005

Future, Fight

“Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970).
Poems

Question

“By the 1990s, it was no longer possible to speak, with any intellectual integrity, of a Soviet Union of Stalin as having been informed by a ‘proletarian’ economic system, or possessed of a ‘working-class’ government. No more credence is invested in the Stalinist, Maoist, or Castro ‘proletarian state’ than was invested in the ‘proletarian’ character of the ‘German National Socialist Workers’ Party’ or the ‘Fascist State of Labor.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 6

“Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.”

Benjamin Graham book The Intelligent Investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor (1973) (Fourth Revised Edition), Chapter 20, "Margin of Safety": The Central Concept, p. 286

Intelligence

“…Upon this, Sher Shah turned again towards Kalinjar… The Raja of Kalinjar, Kirat Sing, did not come out to meet him. So he ordered the fort to be invested, and threw up mounds against it, and in a short time the mounds rose so high that they overtopped the fort. The men who were in the streets and houses were exposed, and the Afghans shot them with their arrows and muskets from off the mounds. The cause of this tedious mode of capturing the fort was this. Among the women of Raja Kirat Sing was a Patar slave-girl, that is a dancing-girl. The king had heard exceeding praise of her, and he considered how to get possession of her, for he feared lest if he stormed the fort, the Raja Kirat Sing would certainly make a jauhar, and would burn the girl…
“On Friday, the 9th of RabI’u-l awwal, 952 A. H., when one watch and two hours of the day was over, Sher Shah called for his breakfast, and ate with his ‘ulama and priests, without whom he never breakfasted. In the midst of breakfast, Shaikh NizAm said, ‘There is nothing equal to a religious war against the infidels. If you be slain you become a martyr, if you live you become a ghazi.’ When Sher Shah had finished eating his breakfast, he ordered Darya Khan to bring loaded shells, and went up to the top of a mound, and with his own hand shot off many arrows, and said, ‘Darya Khan comes not; he delays very long.’ But when they were at last brought, Sher Shah came down from the mound, and stood where they were placed. While the men were employed in discharging them, by the will of Allah Almighty, one shell full of gunpowder struck on the gate of the fort and broke, and came and fell where a great number of other shells were placed. Those which were loaded all began to explode. Shaikh Halil, Shaikh Nizam, and other learned men, and most of the others escaped and were not burnt, but they brought out Sher Shah partially burnt. A young princess who was standing by the rockets was burnt to death. When Sher Shah was carried into his tent, all his nobles assembled in darbAr; and he sent for ‘Isa Khan Hajib and Masnad Khan Kalkapur, the son-in-law of Isa Khan, and the paternal uncle of the author, to come into his tent, and ordered them to take the fort while he was yet alive. When ‘Isa Khan came out and told the chiefs that it was Sher Shah’s order that they should attack on every side and capture the fort, men came and swarmed out instantly on every side like ants and locusts; and by the time of afternoon prayers captured the fort, putting every one to the sword, and sending all the infidels to hell. About the hour of evening prayers, the intelligence of the victory reached Sher Shah, and marks of joy and pleasure appeared on his countenance. Raja Kirat Sing, with seventy men, remained in a house. Kutb Khan the whole night long watched the house in person lest the Raja should escape. Sher Shah said to his sons that none of his nobles need watch the house, so that the Raja escaped out of the house, and the labour and trouble of this long watching was lost. The next day at sunrise, however, they took the Raja alive…””

Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) founder of Sur Empire in Northern India

Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi of Abbas Khan Sherwani in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume IV, pp. 407-09. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition

Death, Women, Men, War

“He who inflicts a vile and unjust harm by using the power and the force with which he is invested, does not conquer; the true victory is to have on one's side Right naked and entire.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Quem faz injúria vil e sem razão,
Com forças e poder em que está posto,
Não vence; que a vitória verdadeira
É saber ter justiça nua e inteira.
Stanza 58, lines 5–8 (tr. Joaquim Nabuco)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto X

Victory

“Transhumanists would invest in better infrastructure that can withstand hurricane, earthquakes, and natural or manmade disasters.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Nature

“In other words, since you cannot successfully time the market or select individual stocks, asset allocation should be the major focus of your investment strategy, because it is the only factor affecting your investment risk that you can control.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 4, The Perfect Portfolio, p. 108.

Time

“Anarchists generally make use if the word "State" to mean all the collection of institutions, political, legislative, judicial, military, financial, etc., by means of which management of their own affairs, the guidance of their personal conduct, and the care of ensuring their own safety are taken from the people and confided to certain individuals, and these, whether by usurpation or delegation, are invested with the right to make laws over and for all, and to constrain the public to respect them, making use of the collective force of the community to this end.”

Errico Malatesta book Anarchy

Anarchy (1891)

People, Law, Confidence, Communication

“For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values — or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be — to be through her son, to live through her son.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Speech, first delivered at Queens College, City University of New York (March 12, 1975). "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage", ch. 5, Our Blood (1976).

Life, World, Hope, Game

“President Marcos was investing in precious metals long before he entered politics.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

Explaining her and her husband's wealth, as quoted in Today (April 1998).

“Education to the extent that it raises an individual's future earnings, increases her future tax payments; in the absence of any subsidy, an individual's investment in education confers a 'dividend' on future taxpayers.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 13, School Education, p. 297-298

Education, Future

“I am trying to convince people--not only the public, but lawmakers and people in power--that investing in the frontier of science, however remote it may seem in its relevance to what you're doing today, is a way of stockpiling the seed corns of future harvests of this nation… Advancing a frontier--history has shown--has advanced a culture ever since the industrial revolution got underway.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

At an interview with Stephen Colbert at Montclair Kimberley Academy on January 29th, 2010.
2010s

People, Way, History, Science

“The truth is, successful investing is a kind of alchemy.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the mind of the Market (1987)

Truth, Success

“By the letter that will accompany this, and was to have gone last night by Major Mifflin, your Excellency will see what measures I took before your favor came to hand. The passing of the ships up the river is, to be sure, a full proof of the insufficiency of the obstructions in the river to stop the ships from going up; but that garrison employs double the number of men to invest it that we have to occupy it. They must keep troops at King's Bridge, to prevent a communication with the country; and they dare not leave a very small number, for fear our people should attack them.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (9 October 1776)

Men, People, Fear, Communication

“It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.”

Joan Robinson book An Essay on Marxian Economics

Source: An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966), Chapter VIII, The General Theory of Employment, p. 66

“I swear by God, the Peerless, the Incomparable, the True One: for no other reason hath He — the supreme Testimony of God — invested Me with clear signs and tokens than that all men may be enabled to submit to His Cause.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Epistle to Muhammad Sháh

Men, God

“Islam's money and muscle power may look impressive, certainly capable of doing some real damage to targeted countries and societies, but Islam has no chance of becoming the religion of a science-based, space-conquering world society. Exclusivist revelations have no appeal among educated people, especially after they have acquainted themselves with the Vedantic or Buddhist philosophies. That is why the Churches are investing huge resources in the battle for Asia's mind, where they face their most formidable enemy. That is why they are so active in India: not only is India's atmosphere of religious freedom more hospitable to them than the conditions of Islamic countries, or even of non-Islamic countries where proselytization is prohibited (countries as divergent as China, Myanmar, Israel, and, at least formally, Nepal); but they also know and fear the intrinsic superiority of the Indian religion.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Quoted in "The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple: Third Revised Edition" by Ishwar Sharan (2010) https://books.google.com.au/books?id=HL35NxR5S_QC 2000s

Money, People, World, Education

“The individual living in America as it was meant to be would be free to run his business as he wishes, associate with those he likes, dissociate from those he dislikes or disapproves; hire, fire, rent to or evict from, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. This hypothetical free man is at liberty to bruise as many feelings as he likes, so long as his mitts stop at the next man's face. So long as he harms nobody's person or property, our mythic man may live as he wishes to live.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Get off your knees, Gov. Pence!” http://www.targetliberty.com/2015/04/get-off-your-knees-gov-pence.html Target Liberty, April 5, 2015. 2010s, 2015

Feeling, Business, Personality

“Some argue that an income tax is unfair because it taxes capital income twice: once when the original income is earned, and again when the investment produces a return.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 19, Taxes on Consumption and Wealth, p. 453

“But when investing money, keep, I beg of you, Hastings, strictly to the conservative.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

Money

“A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

"Pangenesis -- Mr. Darwin's Reply to Professor Delpino" Scientific Opinion (20 October 1869) page 426 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F1748b&viewtype=image Detractors sometimes claim Darwin thought that the cell was an undifferentiated mass of protoplasm. This quote proves otherwise. Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

“The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.
Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 7, “Liz: Black Swans” (pp. 82-83)

Education, Law, Food, Communication

“Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 2 (Harrow).

“Men having capital, the product of labor to invest, form themselves into companies or associations and consolidate their capital that they may reap a greater profit from their investments … The men who labor, taking this action of the men of capital as a criterion to go by, have formed themselves into companies or associations that they reap a greater profit from the investment of their capital, which is labor. That capital of the former is the creation of man; that latter as the creation of God, and of the two is entitled to the most consideration, since no capital could exist unless labor created it.”

Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924) American mayor

"The Organization of Labor," http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=nora;cc=nora;g=moagrp;xc=1;q1=The%20Organization%20of%20Labor;rgn=full%20text;cite1=Powderly;cite1restrict=author;view=image;seq=0122;idno=nora0135-2;node=nora0135-2%3A2 North American Review, vol. 135, no. 2, whole no. 309 (Aug. 1882), pp. 118–9.

Men, God

“If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.”

Masanobu Fukuoka book The One-Straw Revolution

Source: The One-Straw Revolution (1975), Chapter 3, pp. 103-104

People, Food, Support, Winter

“Love is love, but marriage is an investment.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

Love, Marriage

“It seems to me that entitlement is the key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred. The man who flayed the cat presumably felt that his employers were entitled to the cat's skin. Europeans felt that they were (and are) entitled to the land of North and South America. Slave owners clearly felt they were entitled to the labor (and the lives) of their slaves, not only in partial payment for protecting slaves from their own idleness, but also simply as a return on their capital investment. Owners of nonhuman capital today feel they, too, are entitled to the "surplus return on labor," as economists put it, as part of their reward for furnishing jobs, and to provide a return on their investment in capital. Rapists act on the belief that they are entitled to their victims' bodies, and entitled to inflict cruelty upon them. Americans act as though we are entitled to consume the majority of the world's resources, and the change the world's climate. All industrialized humans act like they're entitled to anything they want on this planet.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 105-6

World, Feeling, Cats, Change

“What is the "cost of capital" to a, firm in a world in which funds are used to acquire assets whose yields are uncertain; and in which capital can be obtained by many different media, ranging from pure debt instruments, representing money-fixed claims, to pure equity issues, giving holders only the right to a pro-rata share in the uncertain venture? This question has vexed at least three classes of economists: (1) the corporation finance specialist concerned with the techniques of financing firms so as to ensure their survival and growth; (2) the managerial economist concerned with capital budgeting; and (3) the economic theorist concerned with explaining investment behavior at both the micro and macro levels.”

Merton Miller (1923–2000) American economist

Franco Modigliani and Merton H. Miller. "The cost of capital, corporation finance and the theory of investment." The American economic review (1958): 261-297.

Money, World, Behavior, Question

“We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history — not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources — but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293

Men, Alcohol, Age, History

“Erdogan may have dreamt of a one-party system with himself at the helm far into the future. That, however, is not on the cards. Going in such a direction could deal the coup de grace to Turkey’s already sick economy by drying up foreign direct investment and fast developing trade links with Europe and North America. What Erdogan can do is to build a “one-and-a-half party” system in which the AKP will set the agenda for the remainder of the decade while opposition parties provide the “half” needed to maintain the appearance of parliamentary democracy. A “one-and-a-half party” system isn’t unprecedented. Mexico tried it for half a century. Japan has lived with it since the end of the Second World War. It is also the model that Vladimir Putin has imposed in Russia. The failed coup has set Turkish democracy back by at least a decade. However, had it succeeded it might have caused an even longer and deeper setback.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Turkey – Towards a “One and a Half Party” System http://english.aawsat.com/2016/08/article55355819/opinion-turkey-towards-one-half-party-system, Ashraq Al-Awsat (5 Aug, 2016).

War, World, Democracy, Appearance