from the desk of H. Bowie...

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Commonplace Book:

Latest Quotes

These are the latest additions to my commonplace book.

“People's perceptions of affordability”

Moreover, I would argue that three important concepts that are especially poorly captured by standard economic numbers underlie people’s perceptions of affordability: economic inclusion, security, and fairness. By economic inclusion I mean the ability to purchase the goods and services that allow someone to feel like a member in full standing of American society. By security I mean a feeling based not just on current real income, but also an assurance that severe hardship isn’t just a stretch of bad luck away. Lastly I would also argue that perceptions of affordability are often intertwined with perceptions of fairness: people are especially upset about high prices when they feel that they are being taken advantage of.

Paul Krugman, 2025-11-30 from the blog post “Paul Krugman on Affordability, Part I”

© 2025-11-30 Paul Krugman

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“The Trust Framework”

There is wide agreement on the basics of the [trust] framework. And what makes it work.

What [Frances] Frei calls “authenticity” could also be called honesty, integrity, or character. When people judge your authenticity, they’re looking at three things! What do you think? What do you say? How do you act? … If I think you are authentic, and you promise to do something, I trust you will do your best to keep your promise. Because that’s what authentic people do.

If “authenticity” is about you, “empathy” is about how you feel about others. Do you care about them? Do you want them to succeed and thrive? Do you really listen to them? If the answer is yes, you are even more trustworthy. Empathy could also be called “benevolence” or “caring.”

The third element, “logic,” is your ability to deliver. It’s one thing to be honest and caring, but delivering on your promises requires more than good intentions. You need whatever it takes — plans, skills, training, experience, whatever — for you to get the job done. “Logic” could also be called “competence” or “capability.”

Jimmy Wales from the book The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last

© Jimmy Wales

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“People love connecting with other people”

People love connecting with other people. We get together, we talk, we imagine. We cooperate and build new things. We form communities. Those communities become part of our individual identities. And none of that requires top-down control and direction. It is simply human nature. It is how our species rolls.

Jimmy Wales, 2025 from the book The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last

© 2025 Jimmy Wales

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“Conflict of interests and beliefs was inescapable”

Conflict of interests and beliefs was, to the liberal mind, inescapable. If tamed and turned to competition in a stable political order, conflict could nevertheless bear fruit as argument, experiment and exchange. … When liberals took conflict for inevitable and competition, its peaceable form, for desirable, they excluded or demoted social virtues that their political rivals favored. To liberals, competition in the town square, laboratory or market place encouraged bargaining, creativity, and initiative, whereas social harmony stifled or silenced them. Conservatives, who saw harmony in tradition, and socialists, who saw harmony in fraternity, were each quick to insist that liberal ideals grossly distorted the true picture of society.

Edmund Fawcett, 2018 from the book Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, 2nd ed.

© 2018 Edmund Fawcett

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“In front of your nose”

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

George Orwell, 1946-03-22 from the essay “In Front of Your Nose”

© 1946-03-22 The Orwell Estate

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“The full fruitage of instruction”

But what would be the full fruitage of instruction if every child should be schooled till at least his twentieth year, and should find free access to the universities, libraries, and museums that harbor and offer the intellectual and artistic treasures of the race? Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Civilization defined as social order promoting cultural creation”

We have defined civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.” It is political order secured through custom, morals, and law, and economic order secured through a continuity of production and exchange; it is cultural creation through freedom and facilities for the origination, expression, testing, and fruition of ideas, letters, manners, and arts. It is an intricate and precarious web of human relationships, laboriously built and readily destroyed.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Democracy has done more good than any other form of government.”

All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“The first condition of freedom is its limitation”

Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; organized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Every economic system must rely upon some form of the profit motive”

The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce — except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Moral codes adjust themselves to conditions”

Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order, security, and growth. A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes, and concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes, and concludes to their necessity. Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Evolution in man has been social rather than biological”

Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species, but mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species, and to instincts in the individual; they are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations. New situations, however, do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses; hence development, in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment and innovation — the social correlates of variation and mutation. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“No cure for racial antipathies except a broadened education”

“Racial” antipathies have some roots in ethnic origin, but they are also generated, perhaps predominantly, by differences of acquired culture — of language, dress, habits, morals, or religion. There is no cure for such antipathies except a broadened education. A knowledge of history may teach us that civilization is a cooperative product, that nearly all peoples have contributed to it; it is our common heritage and debt; and the civilized soul will reveal itself in treating every man or woman, however lowly, as a representative of one of these creative and contributory groups.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Life is competition”

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life — peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Cooperation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group — our family, community, club, church, party, “race,” or nation — in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups. Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“History is a fragment of biology”

History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea. Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. The startled animals scurry away at our coming; the birds scatter; the fish disperse in the brook. Suddenly we perceive to what a perilous minority we belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat. Then all the chronicles and achievements of man fall humbly into the history and perspective of polymorphous life; all our economic competition, our strife for mates, our hunger and love and grief and war, are akin to the seeking, mating, striving, and suffering that hide under these fallen trees or leaves, or in the waters, or on the boughs.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“What History Has To Say”

Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads — astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war — what history has to say about the nature, conduct, and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

Will Durant, 1968 from the book The Lessons of History

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“Anybody can become an American”

America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said: “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France, and you’d live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.” But then he added: “Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”

Ronald Reagan, 1988-11-07 from the remarks “Ronald Reagan's Remarks on 7 Nov 1988”

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“Man is nobler than the universe”

When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal, 1670 from the book Pensées

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“We built it for ourselves”

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Steve Jobs, 1985 from the interview “Steve Jobs Interview from 1985 Playboy magazine”

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