Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

They saw it coming. The working poor always see it coming, well before the Wall Street analysts and the Federal Reserve wonks. From the bottom rung of the ladder, you get a more immediate view of the economy and the direction it’s taking. Mark knows that when he makes $8 an hour, and gets a flyer in the mail telling him that he has guaranteed approval on a $40,000 SUV, there is something amiss in the world of finance, a disruption in the force. He doesn’t care, because he likes nice cars, but he knows. And Mark and Robert also know that when the tsunami rolls in, they will be the first ones to be swept off their feet.

I could not conceive of a young great man in the years before he became a great young man without assuming that inwardly he harbors a quite inarticulate stubbornness, a secret furious inviolacy, a gathering of impressions for eventual use within some as yet dormant new configuration of thought—that he is tenaciously waiting it out for a day of vengeance when the semideliberate straggler will suddenly be found at the helm, and he who took so much will reveal the whole extent of his potential mastery. The counterpart of this waiting, however, is often a fear of an early death which would keep the vengeance from ripening into leadership; yet the young man often shows signs of precocious aging, of a melancholy wish for an early end, as if the anticipation of prospective deeds tired him. Premonitions of death appear throughout [his] career, but I think it would be too simple to ascribe them to a mere fear of death. A young genius has an implicit life plan to complete; caught by death before his time, he would be only a pathetic human fragment.