✩ Ori ✩ > ✩ Ori ✩'s Quotes

“That's a nice song," said young Sam, and Vimes remembered that he was hearing it for the first time.
"It's an old soldiers' song," he said.
"Really, sarge? But it's about angels."
Yes, thought Vimes, and it's amazing what bits those angels cause to rise up as the song progresses. It's a real soldiers' song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
"As I recall, they used to sing it after battles," he said. "I've seen old men cry when they sing it," he added.
"Why? It sounds cheerful."
They were remembering who they were not singing it with, thought Vimes. You'll learn. I know you will.”
― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

“There’s lots of people will help you with alcohol business, but there’s no one out there arranging little meetings where you can stand up and say, ‘My name is Sam Vimes and I’m a really suspicious bastard.”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

“History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.”
― Terry Pratchett, Jingo

“And it wasn’t just Joel. None of the senior leaders—Elliot or Sheryl or Mark—thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don't allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Autonomy disturbs a certain kind of powerful person,”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“This is the first time I’ve refused to do something they’ve asked, and it’s a clarifying lesson. I can see my bosses a little more clearly. And now I understand more about how they see me. It’s an uncomfortable realization of how little they care,”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“In other words, the WEF has weaponized the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the 0.001 percent.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“China is, in Mark’s eyes, just the end of a to-do list, the last major project to tackle. Like he’s playing a game of Risk and he needs to occupy every territory.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Friends who have fallen for Sheryl’s Lean In schtick earnestly recommend going to her with my concerns. I get where they’re coming from—this is an issue she’s chosen to take a high profile on. Around this time she is quoted in a Bloomberg article recommending a zero tolerance policy to harassment and saying, “I think it’s great when people lose their jobs when it happens, because I think that is what will get people to not do it in the future. And I think it’s a leadership challenge. As a leader of a company, there needs to be no tolerance for it. People respond to what is tolerated and what is encouraged.” But having witnessed how she treats her own staff—not to mention her intimate relationship history with Joel, a relationship where he often stays at her house when he visits the Valley—and how often her actions differ from her words, I know that’s not viable.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“You weren’t responsive enough,” he says. “In my defense, I was in a coma for some of it.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“When yous say 'adversary,' who do you mean?" I raise my hand and ask tentatively, a little concerned about what will happen to anyone on one of these lists.
"Anyone who opposes us is an adversary," Mark responds firmly. Not acknowledging that when it comes to Free Basics, that's basically everyone. All I can think is how horrified politicians would be if they knew Facebook was harnessing the platform and its power to put the screws to their thumbs.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Vaughan operates in a different way from me and most of the policy team. He decides to crack the China market with his golf clubs, sending updates about whom he has golfed with and how this might lead to opportunities to meet with key government officials. The actual work, preparing briefings, tracking regulations, or analysing political developments, he delegates to interns, or the women who work for him.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Mark's expecting his first child, and he tells us he might not be present for the birth. As the only person who's birthed a baby, I'm stunned. And genuinely curious. "What would you be doing instead?" I asked him. Like, what in the world could possibly be more meaningful to him than the birth of his first child? He had no idea. Just "something more important might come up.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“We're about to travel to the one country in the world where there's an open arrest warrant for Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark thinks this is the time to show us his fake gangsta handshakes.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Five years earlier when I arrived at Facebook, Mark didn't have a theory of how he and the company should be in the world; he didn't really have developed opinions about policy or politics, beyond "sign up more users." The rest of Facebook's leadership wasn't very different. Mark really couldn't be bothered to care. Now he's developed priorities, and they're mostly pretty horrible and ignorant of the human costs.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Irrespective, he blames other people for all of those things, including forgetting his passport. I guess that's what it's like to live in a bubble, like Mark does. But a bubble implies flimsy transparency, a diaphanous space where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. And what Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world. When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it. Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can't even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Like many things at Facebook, it didn't matter what the policy team debated or decided; it mattered what Sheryl thought. In this case she had run into one of her Harvard friends, a surgical director of liver transplantation, at a Harvard reunion and offered to help him source donors.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“He's in charge of Facebook's global growth. His growth team is the capitalist engine of the whole enterprise. Facebook's business model depends on it conquering new territories. Expanding exponentially.
The growth team is in charge of forging those new frontiers, and like more frontiersmen, Javi and his team play fast and loose. They're aggressive and quick to stake their claim, always looking for opportunities in the gray area created by the lack of regulation.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“Either way, I think the point at which you have to explain Nuremburg to the head of the team leading your China entry is probably a red flag.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“The UN investigators point out many of the other issues we’d tried and failed to convince Facebook’s leaders to address: the woefully inadequate content moderation Facebook provided for Myanmar; the lack of moderators who “understand Myanmar language and its nuances, as well as the context within which comments are made”; the fact that the Burmese language isn’t rendered in Unicode; the lack of a clear system to report hate speech and alarming unresponsiveness when it is reported. The investigators noted with regret that Facebook said it was unable to provide country-specific data about the spread of hate speech on its platform, which was imperative to assess the problem and the adequacy of its response. This was surprising given that Facebook had been tracking hate speech. Community operations had written an internal report noting that forty-five of the one hundred most active hate speech accounts in Southeast Asia are in Myanmar. The truth here is inescapable. Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“But what I’m seeing is that the more comfortable he gets, the less he cares. As his importance compounds, his regard diminishes.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism