1999 Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

1999

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past. -Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

1999

She would search for him. In the land that lay east of the sun and west of the moon. But there was no way there. - Edith Pattou

1999

It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. -Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

1999

The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. -Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations

1999

The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts. -G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

1999

Perfection isn’t necessary as long as you are competent. This means knowing how to achieve objectives that may require skills you lack. -Catherine Huang, The Art of War for Women: Sun Tzu's Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work

1999

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase. -David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

1999

There was no answer, except the general answer life gives to all the most complex and insoluble questions. That answer is: one must live for the needs of the day, in other words, become oblivious. -Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

1999

I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you. -George Eliot, Middlemarch

1999

They have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less. -Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov