143
" If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. You're saying: Leave me alone; I don't mind this little rathole. It's warm and dry. Really, it's fine.
When nothing new can get in, that's death. When oxygen can't find a way in, you die. But new is scary, and new can be disappointing, and confusing - we had this all figured out, and now we don't.
New is life. "
― Anne Lamott , Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
144
" Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down. "
― Emma Straub , Modern Lovers
146
" Nonetheless, many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the Industrial Revolution. Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of striptease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories. "
― Ludwig von Mises , The Anti-capitalistic Mentality
158
" What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Whereas a table is a table is a table, humans have no preexisting essence and so define themselves, "
― , Ethics: The Essential Writings
