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Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

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Avi Steinberg

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“But why give a man something it's so hard to earn? In that respect women are really thick. They're the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don't realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don't know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else. Whores are the worst, patron, believe me. They throw their lives away working for some pimp, smile when he beats them, feel proud when he's well dressed, with his gold teeth and rings on his fingers, and when he goes off and takes up with a woman half their age they forgive him everything because 'he's a man.”

“It's hard to explain to Tiana that her feelings about this aren't indicative of what a great guy her 'daddy' is but rather an indictment against how awful all the adults in her life have been...If you haven't had proper love and care, then a substitute will feel like the real thing, because you've got nothing to compare it to. For Tiana, whose entire fifteen years on the earth have been filled with physical violence, neglect, and horrific abuse, this analogy doesn't really make sense. Her 'daddy' is the first person who's shown her any type of kindness, who's modeled what a 'real' family looks like- even though after dinner he takes her and the other girls out and sells them on the street.”

“In any East Asian culture, you will find that women have a very tangible power within the household. This is often rejcted by non-Asian feminists who argue that it is not real power, but.. Japanese women look at the low status attributed to the domestic labor of housewives in North America and feel that this amounts to a denigration of a fundamental social role - whether it is performed by a man or a woman.”

“The American share of the crisis began with grossly improper mortgages provided to wholly unqualified borrowers, all directly caused and encouraged by government distortion of and interference in the market. The government’s market deformation and market intervention was in turn the result of two factors: political favouritism and Leftist ideology, on the one hand; and upon the other, corruption: the blatant cooption of such Friends of Angelo as Mr Dodd and of such bien-pensant Lefties as Mr Frank. The stability and efficiency of any market is directly proportional to the amount and trustworthiness of market information. The Yank Congress, for blatantly partisan and ideological reasons, gave out false information to the market, pushing lenders into making bad loans and giving out, with the appropriate winks and nudges, that Fannie (will Americans ever realise how that sounds) and Freddie, imperfectly quangoised, were ‘really just as good as the Treasury’ and were in any case ‘too big to [be let] fail’: which, as it happens, was untrue. Similarly, this moronic mantra of ‘too big to fail’ was chanted desperately and loudly to drown out the warning sounds of various financial institutions on the brink and of the automobile industry. Incomprehensible sums of public money were thrown at these corporations so that they could avoid bankruptcy, and have succeeded only in privatising profit whilst socialising risk.”

“En numerosas ocasiones me he preguntado hasta qué punto el tonelaje referencial que algunos músicos incorporan a su cancionero tiene la capacidad de distraer o antagonizar al oyente. Era una cuestión que solía hacerme a principios de los noventa, cuando Los Flechazos llegaron a un público relativamente amplio cantando sobre referencias cripto-modernistas que solo una minúscula parte de la audiencia pudo acertar a comprender: el Scotch of St. James Club, Georgie Fame, Mel Ramos... Lo que es indiscutible es que la gente seguía cantando esas canciones, conociesen o no las arcanas citas al Swinging London de Alejandro Diez. Así que asumo que la respuesta es que el exceso de cita o guiño no tiene un peso específico tan grande como yo le atribuía entonces y que, como en toda disciplina o género, todo objeto creado posee diversos planos de significado y uno puede limitarse a entender uno, dos o varios de ellos sin que la canción se resienta por ello”