“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside, but as the completion of a pattern already started.”
Mary Midgley
"The United States has the best, deepest, widest, most transparent capital markets in the world which give you, the investor, the ability to buy and sell large amounts at very cheap prices. That's a good thing and I wish Paul Volcker understood that."
Jamie Dimon
"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Every empire in its official discourse has said it is not like the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest 'mission civilisatrice.' Edward W. Said
