Majicman Notes

Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to… Read more

I think if you’re selling anything, you want to have an ‘offense deck’ and a ‘defense deck.’  The ‘offense deck’ says, ‘Here are the three or four reasons why you have to buy this company.… Read more

What Václav Havel, in his most original and penetrating text, called “the power of the powerless” is capable of putting despotisms on the back foot, simply by being in sync with the simplest and most… Read more

Fighting for what is right makes life worth living. Aletta Jacobs https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/pioneers/aletta-jacobs Read more

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in… Read more

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love,… Read more

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no… Read more

Friendship is arguably the most wholly voluntary relationship. It reflects a mutual decision to keep pasting something back together, no matter how far it gets pulled apart, even when there is no obligatory reason, no… Read more

One must believe in one’s talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant… It may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender… Read more

“The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” Niall Ferguson Civilization: The West and the Rest https://www.hoover.org/profiles/niall-ferguson Read more