“From the time we are old enough to understand, society conditions us to confuse income with wealth. We believe that doctors, CEOs, professional athletes, and movie actors are rich because they earn high incomes. We judge the economic success of our friends, relatives, and colleagues at work by how much money they earn. Six- and seven-figure salaries are regarded as status symbols of wealth. Although there is a definite relationship between income and wealth, they are very separate and distinct economic measures. Income is how much money you earn in a given period of time. If you earn a million in a year and spend it all, you add nothing to your wealth. You’re just living lavishly. Those who focus only on net income as a measure of economic success are ignoring the most important measuring stick of financial independence. It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep.”

“Except in Fencing, in which I had won the Public School Championship, I had achieved no distinction. All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world. They were far better both at the games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.”

“Winston was being taught to teach himself. He would always be a dud in the classroom and a failure in examinations, but in his own time, on his own terms, he would become one of the most learned statesmen of the coming century.”

“he was poring over Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Aristotle (on politics only), Henry Fawcett’s Political Economy, William Lecky’s European Morals and Rise and Influence of Rationalism, Pascal’s Provincial Letters, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Liang’s Modern Science and Modern Thought, Victor-Henri Rochefort’s Memoirs, the memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon, and Henry Hallam’s Constitutional History. Incredibly, he asked his mother to send him all one hundred volumes of the Annual Register, the record of British public events founded by Burke. He explained that he wanted to know ‘the detailed Parliamentary history…of the last 100 years…’”

“to build up a scaffolding of logical and consistent views which will perhaps tend to the creation of a logical and consistent mind. Of course the Annual Register is valuable only for its facts. A good knowledge of these would arm me with a sharp sword. Macaulay, Gibbon, Plato etc must train the muscles to wield that sword to the greatest effect.”

“He understood the essence of supreme decisions: yea or nay, right or left, advance or retreat. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of experts. He knew how easy it is for the man at the summit to receive too rosy a picture from his Intelligence advisors…Alone among politicians he valued science and technology at something approaching their true worth…and he had for seven years been warning his countrymen of the very disaster that had now befallen them. He had even, forty years before, pictured London in the position it might shortly face.”

“Churchill arrived on the scene like a summer squall at a sailboat regatta. Whitehall was galvanized, and the office at No. 10 was pandemonium. Bells were ringing constantly, telephones of various colors were being installed in every nook at No. 10, and the new prime minister was attaching maroon labels demanding ‘Action This Day’ or green ones saying ‘Report in Three Days’ to an endless stream of directives that were being dictated to typists in the Cabinet Room, the P.M.’s bedroom, and even his bathroom, with replies expected within minutes. Ministers, generals, and senior civil servants appeared and departed within minutes. Working hours began early each morning and ended after midnight. ‘The pace became frantic,’ another private secretary, John Martin, recalled. ‘We realized we were at war.’”

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

“We should use our opinions to start discussions, not to end them.”

“Inside were numbered folders containing papers approximately 16″ x 13.″ The first one, the ‘top of the box,’ as it was called, dealt with matters considered ‘really urgent’…Below the top were folders containing military and foreign office telegrams, reports from the Chiefs of Staff…answers to questions he had raised concerning every aspect of British life—food supplies, crop yields, railroad capacity, coal production. Nothing escaped his attention.”

“A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going.”

It works in all kinds of crises -- medical, legal, even existential. It's the 'Ring Theory' of kvetching. The first rule is comfort in, dump out.—Susan Silk and Barry Goldman