Found Words – Ray Bradbury

“”Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”"

-Fahrenheit 451, Part 3, p. 157

Found Words – Dostoyevski

“When I’m with you you believe me, and when I’m not you stop believing me at once and begin suspecting me again. You’re like your father!” the prince replied, with a friendly smile and trying to conceal his emotion.

“I believe your voice when I’m with you. Of course I realize we can’t be compared, you and I.”

Found Words – Dostoyevsky

“Natassya Filippovna did not spurn luxury, in fact she liked it, but–and this seemed exceedingly strange–she did not succumb to it; it was as if she could do just as well without it; she even took pains to make a point of this fact on several occasions.”

Found Words – Dostoyevsky

“You tell me I’m not an original person. Observe, my dear Prince, that there is nothing more offensive to a man in our age and race than to be told that he is not original, that he is weak of character, without special talents, an ordinary man. You don’t even give me credit for being a good scoundrel, and you know, I was ready to tear you apart for that!”

Found Words – Dostoyevsky

“But it was here that Totsky’s precise power of judgment served him well; he was able to see that Nastassya Filippovna herself realized very well that she could do him no harm legally but that there was something else on her mind–and in her flashing eyes. Caring about nothing, least of all herself (it required great intelligence and insight for him, as a skeptic and cynical man of the world, to believe in the genuineness of this feeling), Nastassya Filippovna was capable of ruining herself, irreparably and most distastefully, facing hard labor in Siberia, merely to humiliate a man against whom she nurtured such an inhuman aversion.”

Found Words – VersaEmerge

“these lights are only here to lead us in the wrong direction”

– The Authors 

Found Pictures – Iran

Crystal clear pictures from Iran courtesy of Boston.com. Good work being done by Michael Totten on this issue too.

Found Words – Edward Whitacre, Jr.

New CEO of GM: “…I think I can learn about cars”

Found Words – George Lakoff

I saw this dude speak a few years ago at UCLA. He was really intelligent about the linguistics in politics and ways that words get redefined to fit into certain patterns of sense making. As someone who is, in many ways, very individualistic, I often wonder what makes me feel so much more drawn to progressive political views, and what might explain some of my internal debates and inconsistencies. I definitely think that empathy, as this article describes, is a major part of that.

Not so sure about the uses of “progressives” and “conservatives” in some parts of this article, but the general idea is interesting.

Found Words — Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, Robin Wells et al.

I thought this was an interesting economic discussion in the NY Times Review of Books