Gray Wolf Blog

Do the thing and you shall have the power.

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity……Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs’……The reason is that beliefs guide behaviour, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behaviour may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

“When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.”

Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.

But if you have ever been seriously ill or have received life threatening injuries in war, you know what I am about to say is true. People may be kind to you, but they also fear you because you remind them of their own mortality. The insularity the seem to create around themselves is not in your imagination. We have an atavistic sense about death, and we can smell it on others as surely as a carion bird can

Crusader’s Cross

Normally I only care for a novel if the ending is good…There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

I, for one, would rather cut off my hand than see the United States adopt the attitude either of cringing before great and powerful nations who wish to wrong us, or of bullying small and weak nations who have done us no wrong.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield on assets over the life of the asset;…speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market.

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer-they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

Money isn’t a sure bet, but it’s the closest to God that I’ve ever seen in the world.

Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters. That is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

You can’t quantify reward. You can quantify risk.

We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Be regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your work.

Peace will not come until we have mastered both sex and war. And, to master war, we must study it with at least the diligence of Kinsey or Masters and Johnson. Every society has a blind spot, an area into which it has great difficulty looking. Today that blind spot is killing. A century ago it was sex.

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society