Deducts Quotes & Sayings

As I gather my thoughts here in order to get to the point, I am reminded of a joke Zafar made when he was still in banking. I say joke, but Zafar was always rather serious about banking and often talked about accountability, as he called it. This stuff is so esoteric, he once said, that the only people who understand it are in the business. What about regulators? I asked. Regulators, he replied, have one eye on the revolving door. Academics make money teaching traders their latest research, and politicians don't know their arses from their elbows. Can you imagine the people on a march against finance? The guy on a megaphone shouting: What do we want? And everyone answering: Specific curbs on short selling in certain circumstances. When do we want it? In phases and at appropriate times. That's the joke. It was funny at the time. — Zia Haider Rahman

There are a few elements - especially platinum and palladium - that have the amazing ability to absorb up to 900 times their own volume in hydrogen gas. To get a sense of the scale there, that's roughly equivalent to a 250-pound man swallowing something the size of a dozen African bull elephants and not gaining an inch on his waistline. — Sam Kean

Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional ... If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health. — George Saunders

And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night ... and what your dreams are like. — Stephen King

If younger people see older people who haven't planned ahead and have to rely on charity, the young will be more likely to provide for the future. Today when someone plans poorly, the only consequence people see is a demand for more government. — Harry Browne

With the truth on your side, you are powerful even if you are all alone; with the untruth on your side, you are weak even if you are backed by billions! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children
in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy. — George Eliot

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say. — Wayne W. Dyer

A. D. 1560, pope Pius the Fourth, ordered all the protestants to be severely persecuted throughout the Italian states, when great numbers of every age, sex, and condition, suffered martyrdom. — John Foxe

Readers have told me that their children have learned to read after years of struggle after starting to read Garfield's comic strip and many people who have moved to the United States have said that they, too, learned English by reading Garfield. — Jim Davis

Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress. — Francis Bacon

The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place. — Richard Brookhiser

On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don't know if it's true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old. — Stephen King

Everybody wants to be led. Except for me. I want to lead. — Tilman J. Fertitta

How can the heart travel to Allah when it is chained by its desires — Ibn Arabi