What seems to us serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous.
[I]f you’re sitting in my office for an interview, I am assuming you’ve got technical chops. We wouldn’t have let you in the door unless we could figure out from looking at your resume that you had the technical skills to do the job. Doesn’t matter if you’re a college hire or Mr. Lord of the Database. I’m not vetting you for technical ability, I’m vetting you for the breadth of your vision, I measuring your ambition, and I’m looking for a sign that you believe you can change the world.
Society is made up of groups, and as long as the smaller groups do not have the same rights and the same protection as others - I don’t care whether you call it capitalism or communism - it is not going to work. Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counterpower, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come.
Successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it.
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
One never knows what will happen if things are suddenly changed. But do we know what will happen if they are not changed?
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent.
One doesn’t change. As x changes, it stays the same. It says, “I don’t care what x does! It can run around me in circles! I’m one!”
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we do not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.
“…history is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books—books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?’ By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.”
Book: “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, p. 256