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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0e08047 | In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 921a36c | This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful--various aspects of brain function are enhanced; glucocorticoid levels in that range enhance dopamine release; rats work at pressing levers in order to be infused with just the right amount of glucocorticoids. And as stress becomes more severe and prolonged, those good effects disappear (with, of .. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 91fda5b | pain makes aggressive people more aggressive, while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| f69bb0a | The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets." | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| e6148f6 | Priming people to think of God as punitive decreases cheating; thinking of God as forgiving increases it. The researchers then studied subjects from sixty-seven countries, considering the prevalence in each of belief in the existence of a heaven and hell. The greater the skew toward belief in hell, rather than heaven, the lower the national crime rate. When it comes to Eternity, sticks apparently work better than carrots. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 2487681 | Having lived a good many years as a human, I learned what kind of flowers were safe to pluck and what kind weren't. Envy is far from being a rose. | Matt Christopher | ||
| 03fbe67 | individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized. Our activity, then, is largely concerned with moral matters, but as performers we do not have a moral concern in these moral matters. As performers we are merchants of morality. Our day is given over to intimate contact with the goods we display and our min.. | morals philosophy sociology | Erving Goffman | |
| 3ce846c | The act of staring is a thing which one does not ordinarily do to another human being; it seems to put the object stared at in a class apart. One does not talk to a monkey in a zoo, or to a freak in a sideshow-- one only stares. | Erving Goffman | ||
| 8ae4792 | Morning and lunchtime are times when anyone can appear alone almost anywhere without this giving evidence of how the person is faring in the social world; dinner and other evening activities, however, provide unfavorable information about unaccompanied participants, especially damaging in the case of female participants. | Erving Goffman | ||
| d0e6ea5 | By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. | Erving Goffman | ||
| 467ea4d | He is Jesus, only. God has revealed Himself to us through Jesus. Jesus is what God wanted us to know and to love. He is not Napoleon the Great. He is not Alexander the Great. He is Jesus only. He is enough. My purpose in life is to worship Jesus and, in so doing, become more Christ-like | purpose | David Paul Kirkpatrick | |
| 7c05a4a | Poor health was not just the result of random acts, bad luck, bad behavior or unfortunate genetics. Deliberate public policy decision about housing, education, parks and streets were the key drivers of racial differences in mortality. Crime kept people off the streets and limited their ability to exercise. The lack of grocery stores limited dietary choices. The lack of primary care doctors and specialists in these communities made chronic d.. | health-care healthcare racism | David A. Ansell | |
| e5edbbf | He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momenta.. | death-of-a-loved-one families fathers-and-sons parents-and-adult-children parents-and-children relationships | David Duchovny | |
| f449e1b | Boy," David said, pointing. "That's not our horse." "Of course it isn't," Allan said, coming out from the inn with a wide stretch and a yawn. "It's mine." "Christ Almighty." David sighed. "I thought we got rid of you." "You don't mean that for a moment," Allan said, mounting his horse. "Besides, did you really think to go to Ireland without one of her favorite native sons?" "Clearly a foolish hope," David muttered, mounting as well. I swung.. | A.C. Gaughen | ||
| e5b8125 | Take one famous example: arguments about property destruction after Seattle. Most of these, I think, were really arguments about capitalism. Those who decried window-breaking did so mainly because they wished to appeal to middle-class consumers to move towards global exchange-style green consumerism, and to ally with labor bureaucracies and social democrats abroad. This was not a path designed to provoke a direct confrontation with capitali.. | anarchy anticapitalist destruction property revolution | David Graeber | |
| c2b5fb3 | if one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity. | David Graeber | ||
| 833dd19 | Percy, you are dismissed from my service." "Me? Why, my lord?" "Why? Because, Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly, and the part of you that can't be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the court, wouldn't be worth mentioning even if.. | historical humor insult satire | Richard Curtis | |
| 836f9ed | Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful. | humility maturation | Harold Bloom | |
| 37db0af | Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider. | leadership subtlety timing | Harold Bloom | |
| f90702c | Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between past genius and present aspiration in which the price is literary survival or canonical inclusion. | continuity innovation | Harold Bloom | |
| 56f619b | Wild with laughter, Twelfth Night is nevertheless almost always on the edge of violence. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 31b2e3a | Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form. | love passion | Harold Bloom | |
| 1079baf | Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human. | inspiration revelation | Harold Bloom | |
| bb62454 | It has always been dangerous to institutionalize hope, and we no longer live in a society in which we will be allowed to institutionalize memory. | conventional-wisdom idolatry intimacy-with-god materialism resilience worship | Harold Bloom | |
| 41fc25a | A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality | culture depravity heritage | Harold Bloom | |
| f2f6906 | What Emily Dickinson does not rename or redefine, she revises beyond easy recognition. | inspiration vision | Harold Bloom | |
| b842b9f | Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport"." | emotion intensity transcendence worship | Harold Bloom | |
| 9e971a8 | According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire. | iago shakespeare-criticism | Harold Bloom | |
| 4bb9ea9 | What could Yeshua of Nazareth have made of Martin Luther's outburst "Death to the Law!" which in many German Lutherans who served Hitler became "Death to the Jews!" The Germans would not have crucified Jesus: they would have exterminated him at Auschwitz, their version of the Temple." | Harold Bloom | ||
| 7a533dc | We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice. | literature writing | Harold Bloom | |
| 7e8e11b | Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy." | Harold Bloom | ||
| d633b72 | Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 2ed350e | The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 07223fa | Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds. | Harold Bloom | ||
| ab95c45 | Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance. | Harold Bloom | ||
| 8b21542 | Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty. | distinctiveness openness style | Harold Bloom | |
| 5c937a5 | He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 21b303b | Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the Death Zone--and sooner or later they always do--the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client's life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives. Four of my teammates died not so much because Rob Hall's systems were faulty--indeed, nobody's we.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 6e6ca08 | Continually question climbing pursuits. Do they draw one back to the climbing community? Or do they lead along the [inner-directed] path? This questioning generates a tension that is heightened by disillusionment. Ultimately, one reaches an emptiness, and this is where our basic spontaneous nature leads to the beginning of the path... Thereafter one can continually stand apart from the outer world of climbing, yet at times be fiercely invol.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 7829ce2 | We were brought up to be very independent. Our parents taught us that we were given certain talents and we needed to pursue them -- that we shouldn't go through life relying on others when we had all these abilities. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| dc6f825 | And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 3b3f913 | He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 195be47 | When our heroes turn out to be sleazebags, self-deception is easier than facing the facts. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| f3ee70e | But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north fa.. | climbing devil-s-thumb summit | Jon Krakauer |