10 Quotes by Douglas E. Richards

Battle not with monsters, Lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, The abyss gazes back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution.

The universe was infinite, and there were most likely an infinite number of universes. To sit on one tiny planet in an ocean of infinite infinities and believe you understood anything about the true nature of existence and reality was absurd.

But since finding my grandfather’s journal, I’ve done a little research on the period. Anyway, Hitler believed that the bigger the lie, the more audacious, the more likely it was to be believed. Because who’d imagine someone would have the nerve to spread such a colossal lie? And the more such a lie was repeated, the more likely it would be accepted as truth.

Einstein once quipped that time’s only purpose was to make sure that everything didn’t happen at once.

How had so many of my fellow citizens been gripped by mysticism and the supernatural? By mass delusion? How had reality become so distorted?

Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; and when far away, we must make him believe we are near.