Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

When [New York City commissioners] attempted to establish an esprit by meeting for weekly “commissioners’ luncheons,” moses refused to attend—a gesture they interpreted, correctly, as an attempt by Moses to show them that he considered himself above them. They considered the plant from a Park Department greenhouse that Moses sent in his place each week a gratuitous insult.

[LaGuardia] was mastering New York City as no mayor since Peter Stuyvesant had mastered it. … Doffing his big Stetson for a big fire chief’s helmet, he dashed to fires … from which he emerged covered with soot, and he groped through smoke and flames to the side of two firemen pinned under a collapsed wall and knelt by them whispering encouragement until they were freed. He raced to train wrecks in the sidecar of a police motorcycle, battered down doors at the head of police raiding parties, snatched the baton from an orchestra conductor to lead a bravura performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and conducted the Sanitation Department band at a special performance in Carnegie Hall …. He gave a city hungering for leadership the impression that there was no part of his domain that he did not dominate.

The first thing I intend to ask the Lord, if a meeting can ever be contrived, is Why does their side get economists who write like Keynes, and our side get them who write like Hayek?

Mafia families do not consist of a wife and children who always go to places like the circus or on picnics. They are actually groups of rather serious men, whose main joy in life comes from seeing how long certain people can stay under the East River before they start gurgling.

This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.

Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.

It is possible—indeed, it had been widely attempted—to pile up one sophisticated speculative theoretical construction on top of another (meanwhile compounding the puns, usually on words already borrowed from the French, so that the whole result sin the most barbarously hybrid language), without ever once touching ground and without reference to a single concrete case or historical exmaple.

she found she had no taste for chunks or powders, she wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof