The world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget

It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

What the NYSE wants to do makes sense. They've got to forget about our time zone. World markets are pretty much 24-hour markets.

For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.

[PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii -- James Starnes will never forget the day World War II officially ended with Japan's formal surrender. He was only 24 on Sept. 2, 1945, when Japanese officials boarded the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay and signed the documents.] It was a tremendous emotional moment, ... It was such a relief to know that war was over, that peace had come.