All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership. - John Kenneth Galbraith
Let me issue and control a Nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws. The few who can understand the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls”
And whispered in the sounds of silence
She lived by the beach. It doesn’t matter which one. She waited every day for the perfect wave to take her away. It doesn’t matter where. But every day she went to the shore and looked far out along the waves. She waited for the perfect one.
And the house was never really clean. And the meals were never really good. In her estimation, she was tied to the wave. And so everything was a failure because the wave wouldn’t come. Everything was waiting. Every atom of her being was waiting. And she hated waiting.
One day, after so many years she lost count, she bought a ticket and boarded a ship for somewhere else. And then the tsunami came. And she lived or died or had other adventures—that part doesn’t matter. The question is, was she wasting all that time waiting when she could have been long gone? Or was the tsunami the Perfect Wave she was secretly waiting for all along?
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller
