LV On's Key Ideas from Vectors
by James Richardson

Too much apology doubles the offense

Few plans survive their first success, which suggests they were less about their goals than about the possibility of a little success.

How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.

I need someone above me—the Committee, the Law, Money, Time—to be able to say No. Sad my lack of integrity, though I suppose it would be sadder to need them to say Yes.

Beware of speaking of The Rich as if they were someone else

We've learned to wonder which neutralizes truth more effectively, the tyranny's censorship or the democracy's ten thousand media outlets. In the former truth is too costly, in the latter there's no market for it. In Freud the facts get around the censor in the metaphors of dreams, in Shelley we live in a dream of overfamiliarity and dead metaphor that only the poet can revivify. Does repetition emphasize or hypnotize? Which is clearer, what we see or what we don't see? Are we new or old? Do we love hate or hate love?

Selfsufficiency clings...to itself.