Quotes
This page will be dedicated to quotes from (mostly longform) reading on my Kindle. Putting them all on one page may not be very pretty, but much more efficient that separate posts for each. Extracted from the Kindle like this and formatted with this.
She thought suddenly of those modern college-infected parasites who assumed a sickening air of moral self-righteousness whenever they uttered the standard bromides about their concern for the welfare of others. —Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Added on Friday, November 12, 2010
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. —Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Added on Thursday, April 14, 2011
‘He bores the hell out of me!’ Rumfoord replied boomingly. ‘All he does in his sleep is quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone.’ —Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Added on Thursday, July 07, 2011
“‘I could carve a better man out of a banana.”‘ —Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), Added on Thursday, July 07, 2011
Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves. —Lying (Kindle Single) (Sam Harris and Annaka Harris), Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011
For instance, if a rumor spreads that a famous politician once fainted during a campaign speech, and the story is later revealed to be false, some significant percentage of people will recall it as a fact—even if they were first exposed to it in the very context of its debunking. In psychology, this is known as the “illusory truth effect.” Familiarity breeds credence. —Lying (Kindle Single) (Sam Harris and Annaka Harris), Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011
Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to. —Lying (Kindle Single) (Sam Harris and Annaka Harris), Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011
In this way, every lie haunts our future. There is no telling when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance. The truth never needs to be tended in this way. It can simply be reiterated. —Lying (Kindle Single) (Sam Harris and Annaka Harris), Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011
But by definition luck, good and bad, strikes at random, and a gene that is consistently on the losing side is not unlucky; it is a bad gene. —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Sunday, November 20, 2011
Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren’t sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning. -Derek Bruff, Added on Thursday, December 22, 2011, posted at chronicle.com
Briefly, what I am saying is that, in addition to the index of relatedness, we should consider something like an index of ‘certainty’. Although the parent/ child relationship is no closer genetically than the brother/sister relationship, its certainty is greater. It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are! —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Saturday, March 17, 2012
It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation. —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Saturday, March 17, 2012
What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes? —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Saturday, June 09, 2012
Paradoxically, the presence of the suckers actually endangered the grudgers early on in the story because they were responsible for the temporary prosperity of the cheats. —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Monday, June 25, 2012
When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong. —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Sunday, July 08, 2012
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. —The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), Added on Sunday, July 08, 2012
What they found, surprisingly, was that the one factor above all else that predicted helping behavior was how many witnesses there were to the event. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012
When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem—the seizure like sounds from the other room, the smoke from the door—isn’t really a problem. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012
Another study, done on students at the University of Utah, found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012
Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Thursday, September 06, 2012
One obvious minus is that it’s harder to procrastinate when there’s someone in the same apartment who can see you downloading obscure George Michael songs. —An Unexpected Twist (Kindle Single) (Andy Borowitz), Added on Monday, October 01, 2012
Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out. Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop out rates, for example, demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2012
To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2012
“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.” —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Tuesday, November 13, 2012
What we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences. —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Saturday, November 24, 2012
Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields—from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us. —The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Atul Gawande), Added on Monday, November 26, 2012
Asked afterward to explain the disastrous failures, Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, said that it had been an “ultra-catastrophe,” a “perfect storm” that “exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody’s foresight.” But that’s not an explanation. It’s simply the definition of a complex situation. —The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Atul Gawande), Added on Monday, November 26, 2012
We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us—those we aspire to be—handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating. —The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Atul Gawande), Added on Friday, November 30, 2012
Without question, technology can increase our capabilities. But there is much that technology cannot do: deal with the unpredictable, manage uncertainty, construct a soaring building, perform a lifesaving operation. In many ways, technology has complicated these matters. It has added yet another element of complexity to the systems we depend on and given us entirely new kinds of failure to contend with. —The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (Atul Gawande), Added on Tuesday, December 04, 2012
Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Wednesday, December 05, 2012
Damasio and his team also gave the gambler’s test to their ventromedial patients. Most of the patients, just like the rest of us, eventually figured out that the red decks were a problem. But at no time did the ventromedial patients ever get a prickling of sweat on their palms; at no time did they get a hunch that the blue decks were preferable to the red cards, and at no time—not even after they had figured the game out—did the patients adjust their strategy to stay away from the problem cards. They knew intellectually what was right, but that knowledge wasn’t enough to change the way they played the game. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Wednesday, December 05, 2012
In other words, how good is Mary at predicting what she likes in a man? Fisman and Iyengar can answer that question really easily, and what they find when they compare what speed-daters say they want with what they are actually attracted to in the moment is that those two things don’t match. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Wednesday, December 05, 2012
We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Thursday, December 13, 2012
people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.” —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Thursday, December 13, 2012
If you double the size of the chips in chocolate chip ice cream and say on the package, “New! Bigger Chocolate Chips!” and charge five to ten cents more, that seems honest and fair. But if you put your ice cream in a round as opposed to a rectangular container and charge five to ten cents more, that seems like you’re pulling the wool over people’s eyes. If you think about it, though, there really isn’t any practical difference between those two things. We are willing to pay more for ice cream when it tastes better, and putting ice cream in a round container convinces us it tastes better just as surely as making the chips bigger in chocolate chip ice cream does. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Saturday, December 22, 2012
By that I don’t mean that experts like different things than the rest of us—although that is undeniable. When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Saturday, December 22, 2012
As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason. —Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Saturday, December 22, 2012
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
“We have seen,” Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, “that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.” —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Monday, December 24, 2012
“NO ONE WHO CAN RISE BEFORE DAWN THREE HUNDRED SIXTY DAYS A YEAR FAILS TO MAKE HIS FAMILY RICH.” -Chinese proverb, found in Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Friday, December 28, 2012
In 1871, for example, the US commissioner of education published a report by Edward Jarvis on the “Relation of Education to Insanity.” Jarvis had studied 1,741 cases of insanity and concluded that “over-study” was responsible for 205 of them. “Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder,” Jarvis wrote. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Friday, December 28, 2012
To get a sense of how absurd the selection process at elite Ivy League schools has become, consider the following statistics. In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University. Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were rankedfirst in their high school class. How many did Harvard accept? About 1,600, which is to say they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants. Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn’t, when both have identical—and perfect—academic records? Of course not. Harvard is being dishonest. Schwartz is right. They should just have a lottery. —Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell), Added on Sunday, December 30, 2012