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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 81f3a78 | It started out as kind of a joke, and then it wasn't funny anymore because money became involved. Deep down, nothing about money is funny. | Charles Willeford | ||
| c2c5c44 | The light of a hunter's moon bleached the unresisting pastels from the faces of the towers, so that they looked like titanic ribs of bone, and shadows accrued like crusted blood under the walkways. | Mike Carey | ||
| 478f78f | There are none so superstitious as the educated, for often they see in their own time - as an article of faith unsubstantiated by experience - the final end of human progress. | religion education superstition | Charles A. Coulombe | |
| 0353f8a | Your goal is to reach the point where, no matter what happens in any given day, you just don't give a shit. | Stanley Bing | ||
| e22dda8 | Lying for a good business reason has become so prevalent that they had to invent a new, less censorious word for it. They call it positioning, and people get paid good money to do it, lucky for me. | Stanley Bing | ||
| f591396 | We love stress that is mild and transient and occurs in a benevolent context. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 3fe0b21 | This is great. But what I'm grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happens to be a hospital chaplain. This feels embarrassingly Zen-ish for me to spout, being a short, hypomanic guy with a Brooklyn accent, but here goes: Maybe the goal isn't to maximize the contrast between a low baseline and a high level of activ.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 445e443 | Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine)--their skeletons look like those of .. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 546c531 | One last bit of bad news. We've been focusing on the stress-related consequences of activating the cardiovascular system too often. What about turning it off at the end of each psychological stressor? As noted earlier, your heart slows down as a result of activation of the vagus nerve by the parasympathetic nervous system. Back to the autonomic nervous system never letting you put your foot on the gas and brake at the same time--by definiti.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 97ac04e | Another study that winds up in half the textbooks makes the same point, if more subtly. The subjects of the "experiment" were children reared in two different orphanages in Germany after World War II. Both orphanages were run by the government; thus there were important controls in place--the kids in both had the same general diet, the same frequency of doctors' visits, and so on. The main identifiable difference in their care was the two w.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| a2518c7 | Oxytocin, the luv hormone, makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. That's not generic prosociality. That's ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words, the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context--who you are, your environment, and who that person is. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 577a1df | This leads to a thoroughly fascinating finding--social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| a5c4d21 | Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning. | morality philosophy veganism ethics | Robert M. Sapolsky | |
| db6feea | And I always feel this with straight people--that whenever they're being nice to me, pleasant to me, all the time really, underneath they're only assessing me as a criminal and nothing else. It's too late for me to be any different now to what I am, but I still feel this keenly, that that's their only approach, and they're quite incapable of accepting me as anything else.27 | Erving Goffman | ||
| 93a8686 | Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost-he has lost a whole continent. | David McCullough | ||
| a3c3270 | She was talking too loud now, shouting almost, and a long silence followed. Why was she being like this? He was only trying to help. In what way did he benefit from this friendship? He should get up and walk away, that's what he should do. They turned to look at each other at the same time. "Sorry," he said. "No, I'm sorry." "What are you sorry for?" "Rattling on like a....mad cow. I'm sorry, I'm tired, bad day, and I'm sorry for being...so.. | David Nicholls | ||
| 5659867 | CHAPTER XXVI.--A new Prince in a City or Province of which he has taken Possession, ought to make Everything new. Whosoever becomes prince of a city or State, more especially if his position be so insecure that he cannot resort to constitutional government either in the form of a republic or a monarchy, will find that the best way to preserve his princedom is to renew the whole institutions of that State; that is to say, to create new magis.. | Niccolò Machiavelli | ||
| d49068d | Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it. | literature worship heritage legacy | Harold Bloom | |
| fd16481 | Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 975545e | Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks. | word-choice conventional-wisdom innovation conformity | Harold Bloom | |
| b94bc82 | To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude. | reading thought-life | Harold Bloom | |
| ef38d42 | We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 8102d8e | Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 9df0af8 | seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall. | Harold Bloom | ||
| d51a3f6 | All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home." | variety continuity familiarity innovation communication | Harold Bloom | |
| ed86e2d | We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 35f6c04 | Urging the need for community upon American religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for memories of community to abide, and the believer returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self enhanced and otherness devalued. | Harold Bloom | ||
| b941a28 | Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God. | poetry religion wallace-stevens weather | Harold Bloom | |
| 91ef39d | Reading well is one of the great pleasures | solitude great healing experience pleasures | Harold Bloom | |
| 89d95ee | Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched a contingent of federal officials to restore the rule of law in Utah, including a new territorial governor to replace Brigham Young. More ominously, the new president ordered twenty-five hundred heavily armed soldiers to escort these officials into Salt Lake City and subdue the Saints if necessary. For all intents and purposes, the United.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 9327e94 | My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 194bf48 | The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner; The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout; My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir; The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader by Rees Hughes and Corey Lewis; Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls; A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; Eat, Pray, Love by Eliz.. | Cheryl Strayed | ||
| 7af3209 | It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 0a0d6ae | Lisak and Miller examined a random sample of 1,882 men, all of whom were students at the University of Massachusetts Boston between 1991 and 1998. Their average age was twenty-four. Of these 1,882 students, 120 individuals--6.4 percent of the sample--were identified as rapists, which wasn't a surprising proportion. But 76 of the 120--63 percent of the undetected student rapists, amounting to 4 percent of the overall sample--turned out to be.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 995ce4e | I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 7da880c | He'd just nod politely and then do exactly what he wanted, | Jon Krakauer | ||
| b3e54e6 | pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy . . . , indicated by five (or more) of the following: 1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance . . . 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love 3. Believes that he or she is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people . . . 4. Requ.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 13c0cd7 | The religious literature handed out by the earnest young missionaries in Temple Square makes no mention of the fact that Joseph Smith--still the religion's focal personage-- married at least thirty-three women and probably as many as forty-eight. Nor does it mention that the youngest of these wives was just fourteen years old when Joseph explained to her that God had commanded that she marry him or face eternal damnation. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 1be339f | Everett was strange,' Sleight concedes. 'Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That's what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.' (pg. 96) | Jon Krakauer | ||
| f0ce109 | In reality, the [American legal] system promotes chicanery, outright deceit, and other egregious conduct by trial lawyers. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| f78f3f5 | One man's faith is another man's delusion. . . . | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 5ff0ea4 | I [Lorna Craig] would say that teaching a girl that her salvation depends on her having sexual relations with a married man is inherently destructive." Such relationships, Craig argues bitterly, should be considered "a crime, not a religion." | rape religion polygamy | Jon Krakauer | |
| f2ccca6 | Asked to elaborate, Lisak explained, "One of the things that is difficult for most of us, frankly, to understand about a rape, is that there doesn't have to be a gun to the head, there doesn't have to be a knife present, there doesn't have to be a verbalized threat for the act itself to be enormously terrifying and threatening....There is a difference between sexual violence and other forms of assault. Sexual violence is so intimate." When .. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 82f49ca | When cops and prosecutors fail to aggressively pursue sexual-assault cases, Kevin argued, it sends a message to sexual predators that women are fair game and can be raped with impunity. | Jon Krakauer |