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A Quotes

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All A Quotes

“Almost no one under 60 remembers what fundraising was like before Watergate. Until the 1970s, campaign money was collected by "bagmen," familiar characters from the world of organized crime. As fans of Boardwalk Empire know, a bagman is a political fixer who walked around with stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills. At lower levels, he used brown paper bags. In presidential campaigns, the cash was more likely to be in briefcases. Classier that way.”

“Almost nothing is more elusive and controversial than the challenge of balancing equality and liberty. Societies claiming to be both free and just should strive for both ideals, but knowing how to balance them is the fly in the ointment. For liberty often threatens equality, just as equality often threatens liberty, and too much inequality from too much liberty may threaten liberty just as much as too much equality without liberty does too.”

“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.”

“Almost perfect precision and fine-tuning, containing laws and order on every level in the Universe, proves more simplicity than complexity. Simplicity is the safer way to order than anarchy, which is complex precisely for its lack of order. What is complex to us is not complex to God. Not only is God simple, but the world (Universe) is also simple in his mind (the world's mind at the same time), which is ours too. We may also say that God and the world are complex from our point of view and simple from God's point of view (which does not help much if we only try to argue for the sake of an argument and not for understanding).”

“Almost three years ago, when I retired, my wife and I were talking about our philanthropic work and how does one help give opportunity, particularly to kids growing up in very disadvantaged situations.And my initial kind of sense was, the government does that primarily, and what we should mostly do is pay our taxes. My wife said, no, I don't think that's quite right for us. We need to do more. We can do better.”

“Almost two hundred sixty-six years ago on my home world, Earth, my forefathers did the same thing. They declared their independence and free agency from an enemy that oppressed them. No one at that time expected this rebellion force to win the war. They were severely outnumbered, and they were extremely inexperienced compared to their enemy. Despite those odds, they succeeded in winning the war, giving them their independence and freewill to choose. (Adrian Palmer, Worlds Without End: The Mission)”

“Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed [...] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don't matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.”