Daniel Lyons Quotes

There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.

I think he lives in such a rarified bubble these days, he doesn't understand what reality is any more.

You become so encapsulated in this world of being a star. People listen to what you say, you have this voice, it becomes unreal and you become far removed from the people you came from.

Usually, the 24-hour, high-maintenance celebrity lifestyle can disconnect people from reality.

All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men.

I'm used to living in a disassociated universe.

Greed is so destructive. It destroys everything.

Win any way you can as long as you can get away with it.

People in power tend to get tone deaf.

The diplomat holds all acts honorable which bring him success, all things are righteous which serve his ends. If cheating is necessary, he will cheat; if lying is useful, he will lie; if bribery helps, he will bribe; if murder serves, he will order murder; if burglary, seduction, arson or forgery brings success nearer, all and each of these will be done.

It doesn't seem like life will change very much for Martin Shkreli, basically ever.

Hillary is the Mitt Romney of 2016, where she has very little in common with the average person. She doesn't drive herself anywhere, she doesn't put on her own makeup, she doesn't cook her own meals, and she doesn't research her own materials. She has very little in common with the average woman.

There will always be waste, fraud, and abuse. That's just life.

When you think you're a really good person, you're actually capable of doing some real harm to people, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's the big little lie that we all live in.

Theranos was a combination of fraud with hubris mixed with incompetence.

I think we are just so far away from the political elite. Whether you are on one side or the other, you're still part of that group.

Too great a sense of identity makes a man feel he can do no wrong. And too little does the same.

In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality.

The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.

These Utopian idealists like the Clintons who think they really do have the answers. They think they're following the best minds of their generation, but they're not the best minds. They don't realize that they may be the worst minds of their generation.

And since the possession of qualities presupposes that one takes a certain pleasure in their reality, all this gives us a glimpse of how it may all of a sudden happen to someone who cannot summon up any sense of reality — even in relation to himself — that one day he appears to himself as a man without qualities.

Now, for Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off she is going to self deport... He certainly shows no concern for the humanity of people who are already here... I think you have to live in worlds of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20 million a year income with no work to have some fantasy this far from reality.

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

Usually people who are evil don't see themselves as evil.

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?