Ideas Quotes

In my naïvety, I thought people who were in rock ‘n’ roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren’t, that they didn’t even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea.

If you have it you don’t need it. If you need it, you don’t have it. If you have it, you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don’t need less of it. You need it to get it. And you certainly need it to get more of it. But if you don’t already have any of it to begin with, you can’t get any of it to get started, which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place, do you? You can share it, sure. You can even stockpile it if you like. But you can’t fake it. Wanting it. Needing it. Wishing for it. The point is if you’ve never had any of it ever people just seem to know.

The growing inequality of wealth and income distribution is both a moral and economic problem. If the wealthy are unwilling to pay more taxes, then this is going to lead to spending cuts. And if you put off the table things like national defense, then you’re going to end up cutting more and more out of programs that aid the poor. So, I think there are consequences to this idea that tolerance for inequality requires us to – to just do nothing to make the wealthy contribute a higher share of resources to fund the government.