One need not be a consequentialist to find something odd in a Kantian’s proposal to donate $100 to a famine relief organization she happens to know is especially inefficient when there is a more efficient organization that will save more people standing by.
Dan Moller, ‘Should We Let People Starve: For Now?’, Analysis, Vol. 66, No. 3 (July, 2006), pp. 244
For Gracias, the Tesla and SpaceX investor and Musk’s friend, the 2008 period told him everything he would ever need to know about Musk’s character. He saw a man who arrived in the United States with nothing, who had lost a child, who was being pilloried in the press by reporters and his ex-wife and who verged on having his life’s work destroyed. “He has the ability to work harder and endure more stress than anyone I’ve ever met,” Gracias said. “What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. He didn’t just survive. He kept working and stayed focused.” That ability to stay focused in the midst of a crisis stands as one of Musk’s main advantages over other executives and competitors. “Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray,” Gracias said. “Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyone who saw what he went through firsthand came away with more respect for the guy. I’ve just never seen anything like his ability to take pain.”
Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, New York, 2015, pp. 211-212
Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble.
Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, New York, 1995, p. 425
As to why God had singled out John D. Rockefeller for such spectacular bounty, Rockefeller always adverted to his own adherence to the doctrine of stewardship—the notion of the wealthy man as a mere instrument of God, a temporary trustee of his money, who devoted it to good causes. “It has seemed as if I was favored and got increase because the Lord knew that I was going to turn around and give it back.” Rockefeller said this in his late seventies, and one wonders whether the equation between moneymaking and money giving only entered his mind later. Yet even as a teenager, he took palpable pleasure in distributing money for charitable purposes, and he insisted that from an early date he discerned the intimate spiritual link between earning and dispensing money. “I remember clearly when the financial plan—if I may call it so— of my life was formed. It was out in Ohio, under the ministration of a dear old minister, who preached, ‘Get money: get it honestly and then give it wisely.’ I wrote that down in a little book.” This echoed John Wesley’s dictum, “If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can,’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then the more they will grow in grace.”
Ron Chernow, Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., New York, 1998, p. 55