Towards the end of his life, riven with chemotherapy, John threw fistfuls of his hair out his window, hoping they would commingle with the sheep wool floating about his neighbour Tim Conner's field. A few months later that hair was the lining of a chaffinch's nest where she laid her egg and reared her young.
Let us all have a nest with a lock or two of John's hair in it. God knows what could grow from it.
-Martin Shaw's introduction to John Moriarty's, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
Here the initiative individual—the "great man," the "hero," the "genius"—regains his place as a formative force in history. His not quite the god that Carlyle described, he grows out of his time and land, and is the product and symbol of events as well as their agent and voice; without some situation requiring a new response his new ideas would be untimely and impractical. When he is a hero of action, the demands of his position and the exaltation of crisis develop and inflate him to such magnitude and powers as would in normal times have remained potential and untapped. But he is not merely an effect. Events take place through him as well as around him, his ideas and decisions enter vitally into the course of history. At times his eloquence, like Churchill's, may be worth a thousand regiments: his foresight in strategy and tactics, like Napoleon's, may win battles and campaigns and establish states. If he is a prophet like Mohammed, wise in the means of inspiring men, his words may raise a poor and disadvantaged people to unpremeditated ambitions and surprising power. A Pasteur, a Morse, an Edison, a Ford, a Wright, a Marx, a Lenin, a Mao Tse-tung are effects of numberless causes, and causes of endless effects.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. It is great to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Self-Reliance
"He is a man so sui generis, that I do not wonder at his not being apprehended till he is seen. His influence is of a curious sort. There is a vague nobleness and thorough sweetness about him, which move people to their very depths, without their being able to explain why. The logicians have an incessant triumph over him, but their triumph is of no avail. He conquers minds, as well as hearts, wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody's reason of any one thing, exalts their reason, and makes their mind worth more than they ever were before."
-Harriet Martineau, as quoted in Mary Oliver's Upstream essay on Emerson
If you want to effect change in the world, well, there is a whole science around this, but you have to do it incrementally. And our influence is extraordinarily small. Being rich and successful means you get to fly private and you never have to stand in line for stuff. You have earned it. But you don’t get to tell everyone what to do and what to think.
In the spring of 1946, when Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. resigned as head of the American delegation to the UN, Hermon Dunlap Smith, Stevenson's longtime friend, launched a campaign to secure the post for him. Since Truman promptly appointed Warren Austin to the job, that effort came too late, but the manner in which it was begin is of some interest. "The group I was able to approach," Smith wrote in a memoir of his late friend, "was augmented by the fortuitous circumstance of my going east to my twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, where, in t he locker room of the Essex Country Club, I solicited the support of three classmates who represented an incredible combined circulation and influence: Roy Larsen, executive of Time, Life, and Fortune; John Cowles, of the Cowles newspaper family; and Ralph Henderson of Reader's Digest." This is not what the boys at ward headquarters would call grassroots support.
-Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography, Adlai Stevenson
In America the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs.
The democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant, but all-powerful. No family or corporate authority can be perceived; very often one cannot even discover in it any very lasting individual influence.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter III, published in 1835
First, the fiat age has enabled economies large and small, countries near and far, to paper over their problems with cash. . . .
Second, everyone—and I mean everyone—is doing it. The only systems in existence today that are not expanding their money supply are those that have consciously chosen to forego economic growth in favor of price stability. . . .
But it is China, where monetary expansion is the standard operating procedure for everything, that has truly broken the bank. Since 2007—the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet—the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent. . . .The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America's for a decade—often twice as big. So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one. Capital flight out of China to the U. S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.
China's financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led. That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes—developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control. China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century. This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.
-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
If you want to make the world a better place, work on being trustworthy, and honor those who are trustworthy. Be a good friend and surround yourself with worthy friends. Don't gossip. Resist the joke that might hurt someone's feelings even when it's clever. And try not to laugh when your friend tells you that clever joke at someone's expense. Being good is not just good for you and those around you, but because it helps others be good as well. Set a good example, and by your loveliness you will not only be loved, but you may influence the world.
-Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide To Human Nature And Happiness
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