George Santayana, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Lacking the time to live in the mind, Americans use quantity as a justification for lack of quality in their achievements. Quantity is potentially infinite and assures unrivaled busy-ness, but is it worth it? No, according to Santayana, if self-realization is the goal of individual life...It is Aristotle's practical wisdom: structuring individual life as it is, living it joyfully, and assuring that one's commitments are conducive to the delights of the intellect and consistent with the demands of the time and tradition. It is the exercise of one's free choice, shaping one's life through material well-being, but doing so to appreciate the poetic, dramatic quality of our own existence. To rush through life and die without the joy of living, that is the tragedy of American life."
George Santayana, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Inherent Rules of Corporate Behavior
"The primacy of profit over ethics may have moderately destructive impacts, as with Enron's manipulation of electricity markets to maximize profit on the backs of California citizens. In other instances, it can mean the deaths of many innocent people, as when Ford and Firestone executives continued selling a product combination that they knew was killing many of their customers, while withholding the danger from the public. Their decision stemmed from a "rational" cost-benefit analysis which indicated that settling lawsuits resulting from fatal accidents was less costly than a recall."
Inherent Rules of Corporate Behavior, by Jeff Milchen
That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen
"In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause - it is seen. The others unfold in succession - they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference - the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, - at the risk of a small present evil."
That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, by Frederic Bastiat
