Opening paragraphs.................

All times are mad, but some are madder than others.  The grueling work of people of conscience is to portray through their words and actions a less mad reality—to show the route toward a better land that, admittedly, cannot be reached but that can be approached if enough of the oarsmen can be encouraged to pull in the same direction.

     I did not expect to live in a peculiarly mad era, or to be caught up myself in the maelstrom.  On the contrary, the lot of my generation seemed likely to be one of ironic detachment, banality, and order, the passions euthanized for the good of the species.  But here we are.  And here I am, working to crawl out of the clutches of the sea and up to the prow, hoping to become one of those pointing out the course, away from this and toward something else.

-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith:  How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies

setting store....................

 

I have attended a good many lectures in my time.  I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability.  I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime.  But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays

It's no secret............................

 

Let me tell you the secret to investing.  

     There is no secret.

Sorry to break it to you, but there is no Holy Grail that guarantees overnight riches in the markets.  There's no confidential stock-picking scheme that will give you all of the upside with none of the downside. . . .

It has to be this way because risk and reward are attached at the hip.  If you want to earn a return on your capital, you must accept risk in some form.  One of the few iron laws of investing is there is no free lunch.

Ben Carlson, from his introduction to Risk & Reward

Opening sentences......................

 

The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.  Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Yep....................

 

I think perhaps we have collectively been too eager to deny the relevance of 1776 to us today, too sure of our own superiority to listen to revolutionary leaders' advice about society, human nature, and government, and too quick to disparage or simply ignore the national past that began in those desperate and idealistic days 250 years ago.

-Brendan McConville, from his essay in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding

writing a different story.................

 

Not everyone who supported the Revolution would necessarily see it as an opportunity to make wide-ranging changes in society.  Dissolving the connections to Great Britain would be enough.  People go go about their business in pretty much the same way as they had before.  Of course, some changes would necessarily have to take place because the basic structure of a republic differs from that of a monarchy.  Subjects become citizens with new responsibilities that would alter the contours of society.  Men, though certainly not all of them, would have to get used to voting. . . .

If the Americans were not really operating with a tabula rasa after breaking from the British Empire, there was substantial opportunity to write a different story for the newly created United States, one that would help transform the world.  Jefferson sounded this theme throughout his political career and until his death.

-Annette Gordon-Reed from her essay "Thomas Jefferson, Optimistic Visionary", as found in The American Revolution at 250:  Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding