"The ultimate fate of all intelligent beings has always been to become as grand as their thoughts." (Cixin Liu, Remembrance of Earth's Past)

"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation." (Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)

"He dismisses the idea loftily and informs me I know nothing about it. “The details, yes,” says he, “but this relates to the whole. And of that you are not able to judge. You see only your little sector and so cannot have any general survey. You do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest honour—every man of you ought to have the Iron Cross—but first of all the enemy line must be broken through in Flanders and then rolled up from the top.”" (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front)

"We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast." (Will Durant and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)

"The risk managers’ job feels strange: As we said, the generator of reality is not observable." (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness)

"And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’" (David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity)

Happy Father’s Day! If you have a dad, be grateful. If you are a dad, be a good one. Don’t take either for granted. "No father, no mother. I was three years old when I entered the Los Angeles County foster care system." (Rob Henderson, Troubled)

"Because you do get institutionalized. When you take away a man’s freedom and teach him to live in a cell, he seems to lose his ability to think in dimensions. He’s like that jackrabbit I mentioned, frozen in the oncoming lights of the truck that is bound to kill it." (Stephen King , Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption)

If you’ve ever wondered if our money is debased, look no further than an IPO for a company valued at $1.75 trillion with annual revenues of $0.0187 trillion (and negative earnings).

Reviewing Readwise notes while waiting for a 05:00 flight… "The fact that we had neither nicotine nor caffeine also contributed to the state of apathy and irritability." (Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning)