Just posted new book quotes for And the Sea Will Tell and Till Death Do Us Part by Vincent Bugliosi, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning by Viktor Frankl, A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe and What Makes Sammy Run by Bud Schulberg.

Check them here.

My favorites:

“Usually, the very first thing I think about when I get on a case and begin to learn the facts is: what am I going argue and how can I best make the argument to obtain a favorable verdict. In other words, I work backwards from my summation. Virtually all of my questions at the trial and most of my tactics and techniques are aimed at enabling me to make arguments I’ve already determined I want to make.”

Bugliosi, Vincent

And the Sea Will Tell

“I had been waiting for justice to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague; a cancer slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. “

Schulberg, Bud

What Makes Sammy Run

I’m doing 3 books for the Rudius Media Book Club for the next few weeks. The discussion is now open, and we’re looking at A Man in Full, The Meditations and Epictetus.

Here are the questions we’re addressing, at least initially

1) What is a ‘Man in Full?’ What do the Stoics tell us about being a “man?” (or woman) In the book, who is the true man? Is it Croker or Conrad?

2) How do you handle misfortune?

3) Where does meaning come from? How do we fulfill our nature? Where does one find the benchmarks to define themselves by?

Check it out.

I’m not going to talk much about my religious beliefs here, but if you’ve looked at my Reading List, it’s pretty obvious where I fall on the spectrum. The inevitable question that always comes up when you debate such things is: if we rid ourselves of the old system, what will take it’s places? Anarchy? Meaninglessness? Rampant immorality? These of course are questions that indicate a fear of change more than anything else.

But, anyway, I’ve been reading Hobbes lately for a class. Here we have a man who almost certainly would have been an atheist if he were alive today. An author who not by coincidence is using a biblical term in an ironic fashion as a title. A man who wrote some of the darkest philosophy–not just for his time but for all time. Who talked of man’s brutishness, tendency to do evil, etc.

And what was his ultimate rule?

Do not that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thy selfe.