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Empire Falls

This book didn't have the greatest hook. But I managed to persist and it picked up. My favorite character was Tick.

Amazon.com: Books: Empire Falls

The Prize

At one point the US had such a byzantine quota system (one that favored oil that came to the US via land over ship) that the Mexican oil came Brownsville , TX by tanker, was loaded into trucks that were driven into Laredo turned back at the first roundabout and returned to Texas.

Rockefeller, Getty, Aramco, Royal Dutch (Shell) and others are covered amply in this 800 page tome. Very readable and interesting. WWI and II are covered from the perspective of the quest for oil.

Amazon.com: Books: PRIZE : THE EPIC QUEST FOR OIL, MONEY & POWER

Quotes

I teach you the Overman. Man is something which shall be surpassed.

Friedrich Nietzsche
--Thus Spake Zarathustra

The thing-in-itself, the will-to-live, exists whole and undivided in every being, even in the tiniest; it is present as completely as in all that ever were, are, and will be, taken together.

Arthur Schopenhauer
--Parerga and Paralipomena

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Albert Camus
--The Fall

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.

Albert Camus
--The Rebel

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

Giambattista Vico
--The New Science

Michael Bakunin
--God and the State

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Sigmund Freud
--Letter to Ernest Jones

Man is condemned to be free.

Jean-Paul Sartre
--Existentialism and Humanism

Man is the measure of all things: of those which are, that they are; of those which are not, that they are not.

Protagoras of Adera
--Quoted in Plato's Theaetetus

Posted at 08:52 PM