André

“The islanders, they write: carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash…. Do we have to repeat the experiment on [a] grand scale?… Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree?”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History Of Progress

“Sun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously. Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“This trait has direct animal precursors – namely, the contests between competing individuals and groups that, in many species besides our own, may be resolved by murder.”
― Jared Diamond, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live

“Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life