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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 181afd1 | of eighteen kittens reared in the company of rodents, only three became rodent-killers later on. The other fifteen could not be trained to kill later by seeing other cats killing. For them the rodents had become 'family' and were no longer 'prey'. Even the three killers would not attack rodents of the same species as the one with which they were reared. | Desmond Morris | ||
| 621b541 | The psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappuccino on the go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappuccino. And then I think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it i.. | Amy Hempel | ||
| 6d55b73 | Automatic is what I can manage. Isn't there enough to pay attention to OUTSIDE the car? All I want inside a car is music. When a favorite old song comes on the radio, I can never hear it past the first few notes. The song, evocative, will take me to the place and time where I first came to hear it. I'll be taken over for the length of the song, and returned when it stops, having missed it, only knowing it was there because now it ISN'T ther.. | Amy Hempel | ||
| 7e5e183 | When she sees him, Holly says, it's like the sunsets at the beach--once the sun drops, the sand chills quickly. Then it's like a lot of times that were good ten minutes ago and don't count now. | Amy Hempel | ||
| 89ee452 | It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, "I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you--" "My eyes are blue," I said." -- | Amy Hempel | ||
| 920fa6e | The women advised long walks. They told the wife to watch the sun rise and set, to look for solace in the natural world, though they admitted there was no comfort to be found in the world and they would all be fools to expect it. | Amy Hempel | ||
| 9acd64c | The neighborhood drug dealer kicks out his wife. He moves in a girlfriend and the wife finds out. The wife lets herself back into the house and steals a hundred thousand dollars that the drug dealer can't report missing. The drug dealer's wife goes to India, where she sends her husband a cable: "The people here are poor so I gave them all your money." | Amy Hempel | ||
| 8718ef7 | I was sitting with the rest of my college graduating class listening to the commencement speaker prepare us for life after graduation, and he had a lot of ground to cover because my liberal arts education had skirted the issue for 4 years. I was just waiting for them to call my name so I could go up, collect my diploma, fold it into a paper hat, and start flipping burgers at McDonalds. | Doug Lansky | ||
| 52f704b | S]he was in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee was lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat. | knives murder | Max Barry | |
| 269de9e | Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people's brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time. | hustling persuade persuasion words | Max Barry | |
| 6acf7b5 | Every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged | Max Barry | ||
| 16581e0 | I'm Australian; I know how to use a shotgun! | australians | Max Barry | |
| ddaf99b | This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type--their true name, basically--and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for .. | Max Barry | ||
| e089b3b | I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do. | brain muscle | Max Barry | |
| 6cf80a3 | Power knows power. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| 3077675 | but it's one of the reflections of our times. Young minds today are dulled by television and other visual sensations. When reading was one of the few pleasures available, we could recite whole passages to eachother. | Gloria Naylor | ||
| b6877c4 | For example, you might have a sever sunburn as a child. Many decades later, you might develop skin cancer at that same site. This means it probably took that long for the other mutation to occur and finally tip the cell into a cancerous mode. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 98c87c2 | Already physicists are doing the basic calculations necessary to make an MRI machine fit into a cell phone. | Michio Kaku | ||
| b11ac40 | We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn't work," says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associat.. | Michio Kaku | ||
| a3b9545 | One day , would it be possible to walk through walls ? To build starships than can travel faster than the speed of life? TO READ OTHER PEOPLE'S MIND ? To become INVISIBLE ? To move object with the power of our minds? To transport our bodies instantly through outer space?? Since I was a child , I've always been fascinated by these questions. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 3abf737 | Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 14d767d | your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. | Michio Kaku | ||
| dd9ef12 | n m n`tbrh Hqyq@ hw mjrd tqryb yqwm bh l`ql lml lthGrt; kl mn yr~ lHqyq@ bTryq@ mkhtlf@. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 4475d36 | Studies have shown that retaining memories can be improved by getting sufficient sleep between the time of activity and a test. Neuroimaging shows that the areas of the brain that are activated during sleep are the same as those involved in learning a new task. Dreaming is perhaps useful in consolidating this new information. | Michio Kaku | ||
| 0560df6 | However, animals apparently dream differently than we do. In the dolphin, for example, only one hemisphere at a time sleeps in order to prevent drowning, because they are air-breathing mammals, not fish. So if they dream, it is probably in only one hemisphere at a time.) | Michio Kaku | ||
| 85c1b64 | Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. --ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER | Michio Kaku | ||
| 8137f2d | when a person tells a lie, he simultaneously has to know the truth, concoct the lie, and rapidly analyze the consistency of this lie with previously known facts. | Michio Kaku | ||
| d8fe182 | I don't have to," replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.")" | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4182d9d | time always erodes advantage. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 6990427 | I, personally, have resolved never to display weakness, to be always strong and firm and forthright, to show neither fear nor uncertainty-- no matter how fearful and uncertain I may be inside; I see no other way to survive this ordeal. | may-dodd pioneers-jim-fergus survival | Jim Fergus | |
| 85ace1a | Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's bro.. | Herman Melville | ||
| 5568bb8 | I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will--a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul...the bloodiest of mutilations. | heartbreak | Jim Fergus | |
| 54c662c | As I squat to pee I look upward at the billions of stars and planets in the heavens and somehow my own insignificance no longer terrifies me as it once did, but comforts me, makes me feel a part, however tiny, of the whole complete and perfect universe. . . and when I die the wind will still blow and the stars still shine, for the place I occupy on earth is no more permanent than the water I now make, absorbed by the the sandy soil, dried i.. | Jim Fergus | ||
| d828556 | To share Eucharistic communion with someone unbaptized, or committed to another story or system, is odd--not because the sacrament is 'profaned', or because grace cannot be given to those outside the household, but because the symbolic integrity of the Eucharist depends upon its being celebrated by those who both commit themselves to the paradigm of Jesus' death and resurrection and acknowledge that their violence is violence offered to Jes.. | eucharist eucharistic-theology holy-communion open-communion sacramental-theology | Rowan Williams | |
| a9d2bc3 | No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8f5e92a | Imagine that the genome is a book. There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES. Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES. Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS. Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS. Each word is written in letters called BASES. | genetics literature literaturegy science science-and-literature | Matt Ridley | |
| c8a22d6 | It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not. | Matt Ridley | ||
| fffabe6 | Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 46d0649 | Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You | Matt Ridley | ||
| 11b3f94 | In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiendy ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 442722a | Anaxagoras' belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated. | Matt Ridley | ||
| dc8c5e8 | It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punct.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c08b06a | But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event. | Matt Ridley | ||
| aa981b6 | Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both. | Matt Ridley |