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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7954f64 | Normal is boring. Who wants that? | mgg normal sarah-mlynowski | Sarah Mlynowski | |
| b2ceaf6 | You don't really have to fallin love with him, but he's not a terrible option for a fling. As long as you use a condom. Two condoms, even. | Sarah Mlynowski | ||
| 8341219 | A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. | Jon Ronson | ||
| 94fa109 | Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?" | Michael Thomas Ford | ||
| 5f88d36 | I'm not even sure I want kids, by the way, even if I'm not the one who has to be pregnant. It seems too risky. I mean, what if you end up with a kid that's just plain bad? Or stupid? It's not like you can give it away or put it in a garage sale or something. You're pretty much stuck with it for a long time. I know now they have all these tests they can do so you can find out if your kid has three arms or is retarded or whatever, but you can.. | Michael Thomas Ford | ||
| ebdbd99 | Just because your life isn't as awful as someone else's that doesn't mean it doesn't suck. You can't compare how you feel to the way other people feel. It just doesn't work. What might look like the perfect life - or even an okay life - to you might not be so okay for the person living it. | comparison depression feel feeling happiness human life people perfect-life reflection relationship sadness suck | Michael Thomas Ford | |
| 6de00e8 | People who look down on us poor country folk usually won't admit that anything worthwhile can come out of here. | Michael Thomas Ford | ||
| 0f951a5 | Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 29ed8b4 | That is in part because the very words "education reform" indicate that the question is "What's wrong with our schools?" when in reality, the question might be better phrased as "Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia and Poland?" When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 9b4419b | Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 53f7bcb | It's much better to ask small questions than big ones. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 022eb6e | The non-profit industry itself, "the most dysfunctional $300 billion industry in the world," as he saw it. Mullaney had come to believe that too many philanthropists engage in what Peter Buffett, a son of the uber-billionaire Warren Buffett, calls "conscience laundering"--doing charity to make themselves feel better rather than fighting to figure out the best ways to alleviate suffering." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| c9cfdfb | The data don't lie: a Chicago street prostitute is more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 1218839 | In a complex world where people can be atypical in an infinite number of ways, there is great value in discovering the baseline. And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 35638a7 | 3. Once people are asked to donate, the social pressure is so great that they get bullied into giving, even though they wish they'd never been asked in the first place. Mullaney knew that number 3 was important to Smile Train's success. That's why their millions of mailings included a photograph of a disfigured child in need of cleft surgery. While no fund-raiser in his right mind would ever publicly admit to manipulating donors with socia.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| a55c21d | Keepers jump left 57 percent of the time and right 41 percent--which means they stay in the center only 2 times out of 100. A leaping keeper may of course still stop a ball aimed at the center, but how often can that happen? If only you could see the data on all penalty kicks taken toward the center of the goal! Okay, we just happen to have that: a kick toward the center, as risky as it may appear, is seven percentage points more likely to .. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 98ea744 | We've come to the conclusion that it's much better to ask small questions than big ones. Here are a few reasons: 1. Small questions are by their nature less often asked and investigated, and maybe not at all. They are virgin territory for true learning. 2. Since big problems are usually a dense mass of intertwined small problems, you can make more progress by tackling a small piece of the big problem than by flailing away at grand solutio.. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| 9f9bc0f | If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That's easy: in most cases, the cost of saying "I don't know" is higher than the cost of being wrong--at least for the individual." | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| ce18a94 | Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed. | Steven D. Levitt | ||
| d55c771 | It's neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don't need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 6b3372a | THE IMPORTANCE OF lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans' conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors' morale. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 14609f1 | food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 15f02a4 | Finland's crisis (Chapter 2) exploded with the Soviet Union's massive attack upon Finland on November 30, 1939. In the resulting Winter War, Finland was virtually abandoned by all of its potential allies and sustained heavy losses, but nevertheless succeeded in preserving its independence against the Soviet Union, whose population outnumbered Finland's by 40 to 1. I spent a summer in Finland 20 years later, hosted by veterans and widows and.. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 8ca7656 | Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores.. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 57be4a1 | The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 9f6e899 | The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it's not an 'attractive nuisance.' Most New Guineans don't have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn't have signs saying 'Jump at your own risk,' because it's obvious. Why would I jump unless I'm prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has be.. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 057d038 | In short, we evolved, like other animals, to win the reproduction game. That contest has a single aim, to leave as many descendants as possible. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 5392ab6 | In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities. | Jared Diamond | ||
| 18bde6d | People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land. The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead a.. | Barry Eisler | ||
| bdbb3d8 | In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you've basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go berserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker. I don't care how much training you've had, these are your.. | Barry Eisler | ||
| 1ad7257 | The person who returns from living abroad isn't the same person who left originally... Your outlook changes. You don't take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver... and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. Bu.. | Barry Eisler | ||
| 38cab68 | It's funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you--and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages. | Barry Eisler | ||
| 6955628 | Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destruct.. | ignorance justification manipulation-of-facts perspective self-destruction | Barry Eisler | |
| 40f1b9a | Addiction is a decision. An individual wants something, whatever that something is, and makes a desicion to get it. Once they have it, they make a decision to take it. If they take it too often, that process of decision making gets out of control, and if it gets far out of control, it becomes an addiction. At that point the decision is a difficult one to make, but it is still a decision. Do I or don't I. Am I going to take or am I not going.. | James Frey A Million Little Pieces | ||
| 1d06096 | They say confront the difficult while it is easy, accomplish the great one step at a time. They say let things come and let things go and live without possession and live without expectation. | James Frey | ||
| 798eba8 | I look at Hank and he nods and I nod and for a brief second I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going. | James Frey | ||
| f619be7 | That's how life works. You know it when you know it. They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here. They're on a sixteen-line highway. Driving west. | love young-love youth | James Frey | |
| f2d0435 | Jovinderpihainu breaks it. "You are right to ask, Shari. But there is a difference between being honest and being right. Honest men lie all the time, believing that they tell the truth. Much evil is borne on the back of honesty." | James Frey | ||
| b0248b3 | I want one last look at something beautiful. I want one last look so that I have something to hold in my mind while I'm dying, so that when I take my last breath I will be able to think of something that will make me smile, so that in the midst of the horror I can hold on to some shred of humanity. | James Frey | ||
| 3b7cb9e | You can tell yourself anything you want, but until you believe what you're telling yourself, you're wasting words. | James Frey | ||
| bfd35d1 | I miss everything. I miss talking to her, hearing about her day. I miss her voice all gravelly and smoky, I miss hearing her laugh, I miss getting her letters, writing her letters. I miss her eyes, and the smell of her hair, and the way her breath tasted. I fucking miss everything. | James Frey | ||
| 2875efe | I read somewhere that every inch of rope used in the British Navy has a strand of red in it, so that wherever a bit of it is found it is known. That is the text of my little sermon to you. Virtue, which means honour, honesty, courage, and all that makes character, is the red thread that marks a good man wherever he is. | Louisa May Alcott | ||
| 5ac6a2c | The best leaders never stop learning. | Donald T. Phillips | ||
| 5d9512a | The future of America is bound up in the present crisis. If America is to remain a first-class nation, it cannot have a second-class citizenship. | Donald T. Phillips |