“(The plan should anticipate everything and then permit no changes)”
pg. 43

“Summing up the incompetence of the area, Dr. Dodson comments, “The present state of the neighborhood indicates that the people there have lost the capacity for collective action, or else they would long since have pressured the city government and the social agencies into correcting some of the problems of community living.”
pg. 121

“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it servers to elevate reason to ultimate significance … There is no better proof of this fact than the attempts of all totalitarian authorities to keep the strange from their subjects … The big city is sliced into pieces, each of which is observed, purged and equalized. The mystery of the strange and the critical rationality of men are both removed from the city.”
Paul J. Tillich pg. 238

“I think people would just like to stick with one things for a while, and focus on quality,” he pleaded, in a way that suggested the complaint was his own, not that of employees at large."
pg 22

“…Consensus is usually not achievable. The likelihood of six intelligent people coming to a sincere and complete agreement on a complex and important topic is very low.”
pg 123

“To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological conflict.”
pg 224 (emphasis mine)

“Bill contended that the word exterminate suggested a permanency to a customer that was not possible to provide, while control more closely described the service provided.”
pg 98

“In analyzing and security situation, we need to assess these agendas and power relationships. The questions isn’t which system provides the optimal security trade-offs – rather, it’s which system provides the optimal security trade-offs for which players”
pg 33<

“A terrorist is someone who employs physical or psychological violence against noncombatant in an attempt to coerce, control or simple change a political situation by causing terror in the general populace.”
pg 69

I’ve changed the “blog quote”. Retiring the old tired mainstay and moving on to something more appropriate.

It takes more than a little ego for some one to blog, assuming that your thoughts, ideas and comments actually have meaning. I was always struck by this quote from Stephen King’s the Dark Half. I was always able to relate it to the Stand. When any one reads the Stand or watches any of the disaster films I am sure they imagine themselves as one of the survivors not of the faceless victims.

“… he accused Proprietor Thomas Penn of “taking advantage of publich calamity” and trying “to force down their throats laws of imposition abhorrent to common justice and common reason.”
pg. 169

“At first, he was reluctant to guess what practical use might come of balloons, but he was convinced that experimenting with them would someday, as he told Banks, “pave the way to some discoveries in natural philosophy of which at present we have no conception.”
pg. 421

Many people use the phrase “Catch-22” to describe a choice with no good options. But the true definition of the phrase is surprisingly captured by the dictionary.com entry:

A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions"

In the book the Catch for Yossarian is that to not want to fly means you are not crazy therefore not eligible for the craziness excuse for not flying. I try to avoid using the phrase “Catch-22” b/c I don’t often come across what I consider to be true “Catch-22"s
I guess that the floor I sit on in addition to having a great view has inspired my first “Catch-22”. Namely: to survive the job you have to stop caring, however to stop caring is to stop doing the job.

“Uncontrolled competition, like unregulated liberty, is not really free.”
pg. 88

“When quarreling parties are both in the wrong, and are assailed with blame … they will do strange things to save their faces.”
Grover Cleveland pg. 167

“Roosevelt cared little for Korea, a little, impotent kingdom that fancied itself an empire – and even less for China. But he was aware that the latter was potentially the world’s greatest market.”
pg. 245

Notes from “The Metaphysical Club” By Louis Menand (0-374-52849-7)

“The abolitionists were not interested in reform. They were interested in conversion”
Page 14

“On [Holmes’s] view, successful people, like Morgan an d Rockefeller, just had a better grasp of social tendencies than unsuccessful people did. Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.”
Page 26

“Pragmatically defined, variations are habits. They constitute a behavioral tendency - for if the had no behavioral consequences, they would have no evolutionary significance. Bigness in beak size is whatever big beaks do for you (if you are a finch), just as (to use an example from “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”) “hardness” is just the sum total of what all hard things do.”
Page 277

There is a well known adage that three versions exist to any disagreement. What the first party believes happened, what the second party believed happened and the truth. As a corollary to this I have always felt that when it came to news from Israel by reading the Haaretz, Jerusalem Post and Arutz Sheva somewhere in the middle would be what really happened.

With my recent trip to Israel and the recent happenings in Amona I think this system is coming under attack. Many other bloggers have thrown their comments into the ring and I’ve had a great time reading them all. The one thing that gets me is one sideness of people on either end of the spectrum. You can’t go around peddling one video of the police hitting the protestors and not respond to the video of the protestors throwing stones and the police. In the same vein you can’t fisk a video that contradicts a politician’s version of events without reacting to the wanton violence of the day.