The really revolutionary thing about America is not Silicon Valley. It's the combination of the Protestant ethic, the work ethic, the moral framework, and the technological dynamism. You get God and Gold and Silicon all working together, and that's what makes it so powerful.
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The United States is simply too internally divided to engage in the sort of far-seeing, purposeful, smart kind of international competition that we pursued so effectively in the 20th century. Americans care more about fighting other Americans than about fighting the Chinese, and that state of affairs will persist for a while.
Noah Smith
We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not even as random as that, for we are each the result of one particular egg meeting one particular sperm, when so easily it might have been another.
Marilynne Robinson — Mother Country
"I sent my publisher a manuscript I had been working on for a year and thought I had secured myself by demanding immediate advance payment for ten thousand copies; by the time the check was remitted, it barely covered what it had cost to frank the package a week ago"
Stefan Zweig