The frenzy of high stakes betting was ‘one of those perilous devices by which men try to infuse romance into their otherwise dull existence,
Quotes
Ecclesiastes 9:11, KJV
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread
Jackson Lears
A new consensus about why the world makes sense, a synthesis of science and religion that can be characterized as evangelical rationality. The outlook
Jackson Lears
They continued to insist on the ever present possibility of sudden reversals and the impossibility of matching merit and reward. They marshaled innumerable examples
Max Weber
Protestantism ‘turned the world into a monastery.’ Any ambition could be a calling, if it were pursued honestly and diligently.
Jackson Lears
By postulating an innate ‘moral sense’ in every human being, Smith and his colleagues provided an internal counterweight to the amoral anarchy produced by
Reverend William Stith, Rector of Henrico Parish
By committing ourselves to the blind arbitrament of Chance, to the cast of a Dye or the turn of a card, we give the
Jackson Lears
…challenge the central dogma of our time: the idea that money is an indicator of fundamental value.
Jackson Lears/David Thompson
Great gamblers have seen the grim absurdities in capital and its accumulation. They know that money is merely a game (like 10,000 on the
Jackson Lears
An emphasis on the precariousness of wealth, the impermanence of life, and the arbitrariness of money as a measure of worth – if these