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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
d1900be	That Newton shuddered now [at slavery] is a testimony to they way a strong social movement can awaken a conscience..			Adam Hochschild
5f8cecb	Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso.			Adam Hochschild
1785e05	To get at parts of the vine high off the ground, men frantic to get every possible drop of rubber would sometimes tear down the whole vine, slice it into sections, and squeeze the rubber out. Although the Congo state issued strict orders against killing the vines this way, it also applied the chicotte to men who didn't bring in enough rubber. The chicotte prevailed. One witness saw Africans who had to dig up roots in order to find enough ru..			Adam Hochschild
169bc00	Except for Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and..			Adam Hochschild
a8d57fe	MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW			Adam Rex
41c4ad9	it smelled the way a garage would smell if you left a bear inside it for too long.			Adam Rex
006da50	There you go. Perfect. And can you still throw up at will like you could in sixth grade? That would be good.		gross	Adam Rex
4ef60b5	Project: Potential was a separate class that the gifted students went to for an hour each day. The name was supposed to make it exciting, like Code Name: Cursive or Mission: State Capitals.			Adam Rex
7b3cf57	They were just people. They were too smart and too stupid to be anything else.			Adam Rex
d984f6b	I felt a stack of shelves, and these were filled with plastic bottles and maybe buckets, and one object that felt like the worst thing in the world but which turned out later to be a sandwich.			Adam Rex
1ea2580	You are singing to the preacher," said J.Lo. "Preaching to the choir," I corrected him. "Yes. This thing."			Adam Rex
4d042ff	As far as pets go, a cat is a nice on to have.			Adam Rex
c73b658	He spun out enough toilet paper to vandalize a house and carefully cleaned the seat.			Adam Rex
7c69a80	Polly Esther Doe was born at 8:03 a.m. on August 14.		name polyester	Adam Rex
5e8b4aa	Scottish Play Doe was born at 4:13 a.m. on September 6th. The ink was barely dry on his father's new tattoo.		name play-doh	Adam Rex
450a14f	We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and out of that wanting - well, everything else rises, good and bad. What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place? The light in your eyes shines because of the longing in your soul. And the longing in your souls rises because you are ..			Adam Gopnik
0d7ddc3	People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it." To explain this peculiar phenomenon, Jost's team developed a theory of system justification. Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate--even if it goes directly against their interests. In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 200..			Adam M. Grant
2dd83f9	When takers win, there's usually someone else who loses. Research shows that people tend to envy successful takers and look for ways to knock them down a notch. In contrast, when givers like David Hornik win, people are rooting for them and supporting them, rather than gunning for them. Givers succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of people around them.			Adam M. Grant
73219e5	If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it--they'll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn't work. They're already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren't attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things..			Adam M. Grant
c0ad6de	To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand.			Adam M. Grant
1667d0c	Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you're risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it's likely that your business will be built to last. If you're a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.			Adam M. Grant
6e58c00	The greatest communicators of all time," says communication expert Nancy Duarte--who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations--start by establishing "what is: here's the status quo." Then, they "compare that to what could be," making "that gap as big as possible."			Adam M. Grant
52bb4f6	A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.			Adam M. Grant
0a21838	When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more.			Adam M. Grant
b57cea2	If you're going to build a strong culture, it's paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater's strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has funda..			Adam M. Grant
7b96892	As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and decision expert Gary Klein explain, intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environment.			Adam M. Grant
9b0bb54	Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks--but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.			Adam M. Grant
2272445	The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I've spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expected. The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We're driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of deja vu. Deja vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if w..			Adam M. Grant
ee8337d	Teachers' beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. As a result, the teachers engaged in more supportive behaviors that boosted the students' confidence and enhanced their learning and development			Adam M. Grant
5d08b99	But when I looked at the evidence, I was dismayed to discover that even today, speaking while female remains notoriously difficult. Across			Adam M. Grant
6584ef0	People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it." To explain this peculiar phenomenon, Jost's team developed a theory of system justification. Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate--even if it goes directly against their interests. In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 200..			Adam M. Grant
578b892	Parent and Teacher Actions: 1. Ask children what their role models would do. Children feel free to take initiative when they look at problems through the eyes of originals. Ask children what they would like to improve in their family or school. Then have them identify a real person or fictional character they admire for being unusually creative and inventive. What would that person do in this situation? 2. Link good behaviors to moral chara..			Adam M. Grant
5f478fc	a perspective gap: when we're not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us.			Adam M. Grant
f9dc1ad	Indeed, Cialdini finds that people donate more money to charity when the phrase "even a penny will help" is added to a request."			Adam M. Grant
d9d733d	New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In			Adam M. Grant
39730dd	Consider the four responses to dissatisfaction: exit, voice, persistence, and neglect. Only exit and voice improve your circumstances.			Adam M. Grant
5193816	There's a particular kind of explanation that works especially well in enforcing discipline. When the Oliners examined the guidance of the Holocaust rescuers' parents, they found that they tended to give "explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others." While the bystanders' parents focused on enforcing compliance with rules for their own sake, the rescuers' parents encouraged their ch..			Adam M. Grant
2e93846	Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity. Long before the modern obsession with efficiency precipitated by the Industrial Revolution and the Protestant work ethic, civilizations recognized the benefits of procrastination. In ancient Egypt, there were two different verbs for procrastination: one denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.			Adam M. Grant
1882b00	Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren't qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. "The odds of producing an influential or successful idea," Simonton notes, are "a positive function of the total number of ideas generated." Consider Shakespeare: we're most familiar with a small number of his classic..			Adam M. Grant
3be11fe	The Boov are having seven magnificent genders. There is boy, girl, boygirl, girlboy, boyboy, boyboygirl, and boyboyboyboy." I"			Adam Rex
4babc58	Apocalypse Hal was on the corner by the Laundromat. Hal was a neighborhood street preacher who worked at the fish and crab place next door. He wore a sandwich board sign of Bible verses and shouted angry things at passersby like "The end times are near" and "Seafood sampler $5.99." Now his sign just read "TOLD YOU SO," and he looked more anxious than angry."			Adam Rex
663c3c4	I'd drained our bank account, and there was less than I'd expected in the rainy-day fund that Mom had kept at the bottom of an underwear drawer in a panty hose egg labeled "DEAD SPIDERS." As if I hadn't always known it was there. As if I wouldn't have wanted to look at dead spiders. I"			Adam Rex
fcebaee	I am rubber but you are blue. Whatevers you are saying bounces off of me and I do not remember the rest.			Adam Rex
f537dcf	I think there's a part of the brain, probably somewhere in the back, that won't give up believing in magic. It was the part that made cavemen believe that drawing elks on stone would make for a good hunt the next day. And it's still chugging along, making you think you have lucky socks, or that your kids' birthdays will win the lottery.			Adam Rex

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