Martha Gellhorn

How did I come across Martha Gellhorn? It was a search of politics and coward to bring her quote as follows. Chuck Schumer, current Senate minority leader, is a coward like many others.

Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job. – The Face of War

Then other quotes are so good. Add it here.

I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will be peace or safety: and perhaps these are the same.

Life is not long at all, never long enough, but days are very long indeed.

this is another way to say “day long year short.”

If there is a war, then all of the things most of us do won’t matter any more. I have a feeling that one has to work all day and all night and live too, and swim and get the sun one’s hair and laugh and love as many people as one can find around and do this all terribly fast, because the time getting shorter and shorter every day.

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

the ends never justify the means because IT never ends.

Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin’s purges, an unnoticed similarity. – The View from the Ground

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way. – Travels with myself and another

  • Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was an American writer and one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century.

黄台之瓜 何堪再摘

2016.03.17 李嘉誠在記者会上就社会事件表态，以「黃台之瓜、何堪再摘」劝谏港人「不好的事不要再搞落去」，指即使对政治有不同看法，都要从香港利益出发，不能伤害香港。

2019.08.16 李嘉誠以「一個香港市民李嘉誠」名义，于香港主要报章头版或内页刊登全版广告（苹果日报除外），一则为「黃台之瓜，何堪再摘。」；另一则中间有反暴力标志，上写「最好的因、可成最坏的果」，左写「爱自由、爱包容、爱法治」，右写「爱中国、爱香港、爱自己」，下写「以爱之义、止息怒愤」，各取末字可达成「因果由国，容港治己，义憤民诚」。

“求人不如求己，做人要有骨氣；失意不要灰心，得意切莫忘形”

We learned that Daniel Kahneman died with assisted dying in Switzerland in 2024

Kahneman had turned 90 on March 5, 2024.

Kahneman’s friend Annie Duke, a decision theorist and former professional poker player, published a book in 2022 titled “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.” In it, she wrote, “Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early.”

In a series of simple, brilliant experiments, Kahneman and Tversky refuted that definition of rationality. But Kahneman never contended that people are irrational. Instead he argued that they are inconsistent, emotional and easily fooled—most easily of all, by themselves. “Self-delusion helps sustain most people,” he told me years ago. In short, he made the case that people are neither rational nor irrational; they are, simply, human. Kahneman often said that decades of studying the human mind had taught him how to recognize—but not how to avoid—these pitfalls of decision-making.

Here is the point: we are inconsistent human and we could recognize the bias but we could not avoid them.

We are making many decisions. Perhaps some are good and some are bad. In the end, it is just a different path of your life. There is no good or bad.