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Her propensity for receiving free merchandise quickly turned into a philosophy about women speaking up and taking communication back to basics. In the middle of the night, Alix changed her Instagram bio to #LetHerSpeak.

— Such a fun age by Nicole Lewis, Kiley Reid

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

— A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Her logic was a combination of half-truths and clichés, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

— A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Moreover, as every police unit dedicated to ‘serious crime’ will have found out, illegal acts committed at the ‘top’ are exceedingly difficult to disentangle from the dense network of daily ‘ordinary’ company dealings. When it comes to activity which openly pursues personal gain at the expense of others, the borderline between moves that are allowed and disallowed is necessarily poorly defined and always contentious – nothing to compare with the comforting unambiguity of the act of safe-breaking of forcing a lock.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

‘Flexibility’ only pretends to be a ‘universal principle’ of economic sanity, one that applies in equal measure to both the demand and the supply side of the labour market. The sameness of the term conceals its sharply different substance on each side of the divide. Flexibility of the demand side means freedom to move wherever greener pastures beckon, leaving the refuse and waste spattered around the last camp for the left-behind locals to clean up; above all, it means freedom to disregard all considerations except such as ‘make economic sense’. What looks, however, like flexibility on the demand side, rebounds on all those cast on the supply side as hard, cruel, impregnable and unassailable fate: jobs come and go, they vanish as soon as they appeared, they are cut in pieces and withdrawn without notice while the rules of the hiring/firing game change without warning – and there is little the job-holders and job-seekers may do to stop the see-saw. And so to meet the standards of flexibility set for them by those who make and unmake the rules –to be ‘flexible’ in the eyes of the investors – the plight of the ‘suppliers of labour’ must be as rigid and inflexible as possible – indeed, the very contrary of ‘flexible’: their freedom to choose, to accept or refuse, let alone to impose their own rules on the game, must be cut to the bare bone.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman

The rich who were put on display as personal heroes for universal adoration and the patterns of universal emulation used once to be the ‘self-made men’, whose lives epitomized the benign effects of the work ethic and of reason strictly and doggedly adhered to. This is no longer the case. The object of adoration is now wealth itself – wealth as the warrant for a most fanciful and prodigal life-style. It is what one can do that matters, not what is to be done or what has been done. Universally adored in the persons of the rich is their wondrous ability to pick and choose the contents of their lives, places to live in now and then, partners to share those places with – and to change all of them at will and without effort; the fact that they seem never to reach points of no return, that there is no visible end to their reincarnations, that their future looks forever richer in content and more enticing than their past; and, last but not least, that the only thing which seems to matter to them is the range of prospects their wealth seems to throw open. These people seem, indeed, to be guided by the aesthetics of consumption; it is the display of extravagant, even frivolous aesthetic taste, not the obedience to work ethic or dry, abstemious precept of reason, the connoisseurship, not a mere financial success, that lie at the heart of their perceived greatness and founds their right to universal admiration.

— Globalization by Zygmunt Bauman