This year has begun hopefully for right thinkers. After all these centuries of feudal barbarism and political slavery, it is surprising to see how the word of 'liberty' sets minds on fire.
Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
That's been lost. It's a huge problem. What you have is you have the major institutions of the world all wanting to deleverage. They want to take down their assets and liabilities. What seemed so easy to borrow against a year ago now looks like rat poison to them. So they're trying to deleverage. There is only one institution in the world that can leverage up in a way that's all a countervailing force to that, and that's the United States Treasury.
It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.
But at sixteen the conscience rarely gnaws So much, as when we call our old debts in At sixty years, and draw the accounts of evil, And find a deuced balance with the devil.
Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best.
The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.
Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would've wanted to play 10 years ago, I don't want to play now.
At the moment about 350,000 students return to China from abroad each year - 350,000 young and educated people. I know about them because they know me and often ask me in the street if they can take a selfie with me. These folks are creative and ironic, and the government can ultimately not control what is going on in their heads.
I've already written a section in the annual report for next year explaining why I think in one case that the figures on our balance sheet as calculated are wrong. But it's the standard way of doing it. It's holy writ. The SEC wants us to do it that way, and we'll do it that way, and I'll explain why I think it's wrong and shareholders can read it and see whether they agree with my logic or don't.
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.
I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.