• ...about three days after the operation he saw the moon for the first time. At first he thought it a reflection in the window, but when he realised, or was told, it was the moon, he expressed surprise at its crescent shape, expecting a “quarter moon” to look like a quarter piece of cake!
  
  
• ...Mr. Winn told us that on the drive down S.B. had been almost completely unresponsive, accepting quite calmly what must have been unfamiliar visual scenes. He complained that the world seemed a drab place, though when the sun appeared he could see more clearly, and he was disappointed when it set.
  
  
• We took him round London, and showed him several of the “sights”, but he was almost uniformly bored. He found all buildings dull, of no interest. His only signs of appreciation were to moving objects, particularly the pigeons in Trafalgar Square... He found the traffic frightening, and would not attempt to cross even a comparatively small street by
  himself. This was in marked contrast to his former behaviour, as described to us by his wife, when he would cross any street in his own town by himself.
  
  
• Six months after the operation... talking to him now he seemed dispirited, and we formed a strong impression that his sight was to him almost entirely disappointing. It
  enabled him to do a little more, and he had a strong desire to drive a car, but it became clear that the opportunities it afforded him were less than he had imagined. We found a still active middle-aged man of fairly high intelligence, but with a labourer’s job and unable to read more than a few simple words [...] He described the world as rather drab; he still to a great extent lived the life of a blind man, sometimes not bothering to put on the light at night, and he still made little of the normal visual occupations of the cinema or television. He certainly relied a great deal on vision, but we formed the impression that this very reliance cost him his self-respect, for he had been proud of his abilities when
  the handicap was obvious, but now his previous achievements seemed paltry and his present position almost foolish. He was not a man to talk freely, but was obviously depressed, and we felt that he had lost more than he had gained by recovery of sight.
  
  
• His story is in some ways tragic. He suffered one of the greatest handicaps, and yet he lived with energy and enthusiasm. When his handicap was apparently swept away, as by a miracle, he lost his peace and his self-respect.

В то время, как я исправлял новое издание этой книги в гранках, до меня дошло письмо, первое за семь лет, от Хайнца, моего ближайшего "вражеского" друга, в котором он рассказал, как воевал в России, а потом попал в плен к американцам. После того, как военные действия закончились, командование лагеря для военопленных неофициально позволило ему, и многим другим, убежать. Впоследствии они пересылали все письма Хайнцу, которые приходили в лагерь, на его домашний адрес, с пометкой "Сбежал"!

Один из самых вредных видов самолюбования - выражения типа "и пусть меня все травят за то, что я сейчас скажу...", "опять обнаружу свои людоедские взгляды...", "да, такой вот я неполиткорректный...", ипроч. ипроч. [...] Если убежден в чем-то, так и скажи. А пытаться напяливать на себя рясу мученика от политкорректности или общественного мнения - позорно. Пусть речи твои будут - да-да, нет-нет, а остальное от лукавого.

A guy I know was working at a California tattoo shop, and this guy came in wanting several lines of text on his forearm: that day's date, the time of his arrival, and the name and address of the tattoo shop that they were in. Tattooer tried to talk the guy out of it, since the prospective client had no other tattoos, and why get this as a tattoo? The guy says that he knows it's weird, but he expects time travel to have been perfected within his lifetime, and he wants his future self to have specific directions for where and when to find himself; he figured that this is his best bet of striking it rich and avoiding regret forever. Another tattooer steps up and takes the client, mostly holding back his laughter.
Tattoo took about an hour. Guy spends the whole time staring the door down, waiting for his own familiar-but-older face to greet him. Finishes and pays, starts to look shaken. Takes a seat in the lobby, begins to look quite nervous and sad. By this point all the employees have heard the story and are fucking with him: "Maybe your arm will be amputated." "What if you forget how to read?" Eventually, very nearly in tears, the guy left, bearing the permanent mark of a failed experiment.

Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning.

When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process. When Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover to let the Depression run its course, so as to “purge the rottenness” from the system, he was offering advice that, however bad it was as economics, resonated psychologically with many people (and still does).

By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. [...] I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter. And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.

1. Some people say the glass is half full.
   Some people say the glass is half empty.
   Engineers say the glass is twice as big as necessary.
   
   
   
2.