It always seemed that you'd take me off to some place where an enormous, man-sized evil spider lived and we'd gaze at him for the rest of our lives and be afraid of him. That's how we'd spend our mutual love.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 593.
The great misfortune is there's no time.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 446.
If a great nation doesn't believe that the truth resides in it alone (in it alone, to the exclusion of all other nations), if it doesn't believe that it alone is capable and chosen to resurrect and save everyone through its own history, then it immediately ceases to be a great nation and is at once transformed merely into ethnographic material. A genuinely great nation can never be content to play a secondary role in human history, not even a primary role; it must necessarily and exclusively be first. A nation which loses this faith can no longer be a nation.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 265-66.
Those who can speak well are those who speak briefly.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Devils. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1999, 232.While Peter Stepanovich's sentiments echo Polonius, the computer algorithms recently involved in the spoofing of a Chinese clean energy company take brevity to the next level completely:
At 10:17 a.m. and 23 seconds, a large 426,000 share sell order piled up at the current market price of HK$6.80. Two small trades were done at slightly lower prices, but then the price at which traders were willing to buy the shares fell to HK$3.45, according to data from Thomson Reuters.
This low bid showed that there weren’t many buyers in the market, potentially setting the stage for a big share decline. Computer algorithms, which trade automatically based on current market data, likely detected the sudden shift and reacted by selling more or pulling out of the market altogether, according to traders.
Nearly 16 hundredths of a second later, a series of smaller buy orders ranging from 8,000 to 30,000 shares trades were made at rapidly declining prices. The first buy order was priced at HK$6.69, and four tenths of a second later, a trade occurred at HK$6.10. Once that trade occurred, the next highest bid became HK$3.45 and over the next several hundredths of a second, the price that people were willing to sell shares fell to HK$4.50.
A trade occurred at HK$4.50, meaning the official market price had fallen by 26% in fractions of a second. Hanergy shares briefly recovered but then sold off again. They were trading at HK$3.91 when the shares were suspended at 10:40 after falling 47% and wiping out $20 billion worth of market value.
“The rate that the algorithm was selling at was too great for the market,” said Eric Hunsader of Winnetka, Ill., market-data firm Nanex, who examined the trades. He said the collapse could have been caused by high-speed traders pulling out of the market due to heavy selling by an investor looking to unload a large chunk of stock. Such investor trades are typically handled by computer algorithms.
Wong, Jacky, and Patterson, Scott. "Rapid Trades Sank Fortune in a Second." The Wall Street Journal., Saturday/Sunday, May 23 - 24, 2015, A1, Accessed on May 25 at http://www.wsj.com/articles/hanergy-bulk-of-stock-collapse-occurred-in-less-than-a-second-1432316315
"Everyone has to judge from himself," he said, flushing. "Absolute freedom will occur only when it doesn't matter whether one lives or dies. That's the goal for everyone."
"The goal? But then no one might want to live?"
"No, no one," he said decisively.
"Man fears death because he loves life-that's how I understand it," I observed, "and that's what nature decreed."
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| Manuscript of Dostoevsky's Devils |
"That's disgusting-it's where the whole deception lies!" he cried, his eyes flashing. "Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Everything is now pain and fear. Man loves life now because he loves pain and fear. That's how it's been. Life is given in return for pain and fear now, and that's the whole deception. But man is still not really man. There will come a new man, happy and proud. he who doesn't care whether he lives or dies-he'll be the new man. He who conquers pain and fear-will become God. And then the old God will no longer exist."
"Doesn't that mean then, that you think God exists?"
"He doesn't exist, yet He does. There's no pain in the stone, but there's pain in the fear of the stone. God is the pain of fear of death. He who conquers pain and fear-will become God. Then a new life will dawn; there'll be a new man; everything will be new . . . History will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the destruction of God, and from the destruction of God to . . ."
"To the gorilla?"
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 121To the gorilla, indeed.
It's also true that the gentlemen of mediocre talent have usually written themselves out in the most pitiful fashion by the time they reach venerable old age, though often they themselves don't realize it. It frequently turns out that a writer who's said to have very profound ideas, and who's expected to exert a very serious influence on the development of society, in the end reveals such triviality and insipidity in his fundamental themes that no one regrets the fact that he managed to write himself out so soon.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 89
"But you can hardly know in practice what's meant by administrative ecstasy -precisely what sort of thing it is."
"Administrative ecstasy? No, I don't know."
"It's . . . Vous savez, chez nous. . . En un mot, appoint some insignificant nonentity to a position, say, selling stupid railway tickets, and this nonentity will immediately conclude that he has the right to look down upon you as if he were Jupiter when you come to him to buy a ticket, pour vous montrer son pouvoir. 'Now then,' he says, 'I'll demonstrate my power over you. . .' And it reaches the point of administrative ecstasy in these people."
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and Katz, Michael R., trans. Devils. Oxford University Press, 1999, 58-9
