Quotes & Highlights

“What we lack in subtlety, we make up for with a lack of subtlety.”
— Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog
with more memories than possibilities;
— Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog
the Mexicans can accept American military aide only through the veil of the War on Drugs. Not unlike the American Congress, Hobbs thinks. The Vietnam Syndrome prevents Congress from authorizing a penny to wage covert wars against Communists, but they’ll always open the vault to fight the drug war. So you don’t go to Capitol Hill to tell them you’re helping your allies and neighbors defend themselves against Marxist guerrillas; no, you send your supporters in the DEA to ask for money to keep drugs out of the hands of America’s young people.
— Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog
Art can’t decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it’s a tragic, bloody farce.
— Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog
It should be assumed that medieval figures for military forces, battle casualties, plague deaths, revolutionary hordes, processions, or any groups en masse are generally enlarged by several hundred percent. This is because the chroniclers did not use numbers as data but as a device of literary art to amaze or appall the reader.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
From the way a site is designed to the way information is presented to how you write about things, you can quickly realize that all those things are levers that change the game of your blog. The choices you make should be tied directly to your goals, so don’t just think about games for the sake of them.
— Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents
‘When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.’
— Hugh Howey, Shift Omnibus Edition
“Secrets quickly revealed often seem more profound than they really are.”
— Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead
Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occurring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.
— Nir Eyal and Ryan Hoover, Hooked
“What is a government but an institutionalized method of making sure somebody else does all the work?
— Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn Trilogy