66 Quotes by Philipp Meyer

There’s no sense kissing the Devil till you’ve met him.

It was like this all up and down the river and many of the young people, the way they accepted their lack of prospects, it was like watching sparks die in the night... He didn’t see how the country could survive like this in the long run; a stable society required stable jobs, there wasn’t anything more to it than that.

I went upstairs to my office, lay in the dark among my books – the only comforting thing I have.

It was only later, when the children were grown, that she knew she had been right, that once people grew used to free money, to laboring only when the mood struck them, they began to think there was something low about work. They became desperate to excuse their own laziness. They came to believe that their family property was something inherent to life itself, like water or air or clean sheets.

And one day... there would be no record, nothing left standing, to show that anything had ever been built in America. It was going to cause big problems, he didn’t know how but he felt it. You could not have a country, not this big, that didn’t make things for itself. There would be ramifications eventually.

If a man has done it, so can you: that is what our father used to tell us.

Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they’re causing, and they will not stop until they’ve run the world economy off a cliff.

It had been a turning point in her life, in some sense it’s most important moment; she had seen the world and retreated.

They could not seem to grasp that what mattered was what you did. Not what you said or thought about.