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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7a2f298 | Zigzag... don't bunch up. Weave like a drunk on New Year's... Got it? | Max Allan Collins | ||
| 8e6e2ac | Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace. | Max Allan Collins | ||
| c8f99fc | Is that where you took care of him? In a restroom?" "No. I walked him out to the runway and threw him in front of a Boeing." | sarcasm | Max Allan Collins | |
| 0f8b841 | I'm not going to ruin my movie because of some stupid ruling that it has to be ninety minutes long. That's just like adding three more plates to the last supper, or an extra wing to the Pentagon. | Charles Willeford | ||
| 4f4c6ce | The Filipino houseboy was conscious now | noir | Charles Willeford | |
| 6c02ae5 | By the end of a short walk, the septic tip of a cane probably collects enough germs to destroy a small city. | Charles Willeford | ||
| 0e1edb6 | he was an oddity of some magnitude. | Charles Willeford | ||
| 3ed10d0 | Eat an apple,sing a song, Don't touch a snake as it wriggles along. Run for an hour, walk for a day, Hark to the birds and heed what they say. | quentin-blake | Joan Aiken | |
| 8c16a31 | Because all the waters of the ocean won't fill a bucket with a hole in it. And that's their fall, and that's their fellowship. Desire. The hole in the bucket: the gulf of yearning into which the soul empties itself. | Mike Carey | ||
| 56b3706 | Truth isn't handed *down*, brother. You beat it out with *hammers* and anneal it in your own *blood*. | Mike Carey | ||
| b1958c6 | The key fob played the first bar of Fur Elise as I locked the car up. I hoped that Beethoven's ghost was out there somewhere, making the night hideous for the managing director of Ford's. | Mike Carey | ||
| 431a9c2 | Nothing matters more than the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world. | Mike Carey | ||
| dff743c | And there's a darker side to Peckham, too, once you get in deep: a side I like a lot more, because I identify with the past and prefer even worm-eaten wood to wipe-clean plastic. | Mike Carey | ||
| 8430773 | The world seems to work in predictable ways, and you think you see the pattern. But that's fatal. Because it's only a pattern until you meet the first event that doesn't fit. And by then it's too late. By then, all the tricks you've learned to deal with the world -- well, they just don't work anymore. | neil-gaiman neverwhere | Mike Carey | |
| 48be7d0 | I learn about how stories work for the same reason that soldiers learn how to strip a rifle. You should, too. | stories storytelling | Mike Carey | |
| 16fa5a7 | At least the smoke would give me a little cover; it was also choking me, making my eyes water and my lungs ache and spasm with each breath, but you can't have everything. | Mike Carey | ||
| 55cffcc | Anyhow, his basic philosophy was encapsulated in his famous statement, "I have an agreement with my people. They can say what they want. I can do what I want." | Stanley Bing | ||
| 457486c | TRUTH #1: Work is suffering. The ability to boss other people around destroys much of human decency. | Stanley Bing | ||
| f2e9478 | TRUTH #2: Desire is the root of suffering. It is the desire to achieve, to live, to make things tolerable and pleasant, and even better, that creates untold pain in the lives of men and women. Want nothing, and you shall not be disappointed. | Stanley Bing | ||
| 085d2c7 | There are those who treat every human interaction as a military engagement that could escalate into a potential battle leading to a nice, satisfying conflict that's part of a war. There is a name for such people. They're called assholes. | Stanley Bing | ||
| 3f62043 | The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW | Stanley Bing | ||
| be00456 | That is the way of management from time immemorial, in medieval feudal states, communist dictatorships, and capitalist conference rooms alike. It is the way the powerful treat those less so, and it is the human condition. | Stanley Bing | ||
| 1e9f170 | So this smart, overpaid, sassy dude goes into his first major meeting with our then-CEO, Mark. He spends a fair amount of time shitting on the efforts of the corporation to date, and making a lot of noises about revamping the entire landscape and not with a spade and shovel, either, no, with some very heavy machinery. In the process, he evinces almost no particular knowledge of our company, and also manages to poop on the parades of everyon.. | Stanley Bing | ||
| 54aac73 | Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward's art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm's way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms. George Bernard Shaw | Stanley Bing | ||
| a4ae1ef | Your enemy is presenting you with new options and challenges every day. If you respond in a wholly expected way each time, you will become predictable, and a predictable enemy is much easier to defeat than one who treats his adversaries to a surprise on a regular basis. | Stanley Bing | ||
| 88ba6cd | You are, inarguably, one of the finest officers who has ever worn the uniform. You eat the impossible for breakfast. You seek out challenges most would never contemplate, holding yourself to ridiculously high standards, and you do it with a ready smile, keen wit, formidable intelligence, and a compassionate heart. You are a bloody beacon in the darkness, an inspiration to anyone dedicating their lives to Starfleet. To a man, those who have .. | Kirsten Beyer | ||
| 7634c15 | but the sudden stark reality that things were never going to be the same again. | Kathryn Hughes | ||
| 76d3af6 | The falls of our life provide us with the energy to propel ourselves to a higher level. | Wayne W. Dyer | ||
| f7d698b | It was the small things she took pleasure in. The faint hum of a huge furry bumble bee busily flitting from one flower to another, oblivious to the fact that it was completing a task on which the entire human race depended. | Kathryn Hughes | ||
| 78970b6 | The subject of one experiment is a rat that receives mild electric shocks (roughly equivalent to the static shock you might get from scuffing your foot on a carpet). Over a series of these, the rat develops a prolonged stress-response: its heart rate and glucocorticoid secretion rate go up, for example. For convenience, we can express the long-term consequences by how likely the rat is to get an ulcer, and in this situation, the probability.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 4af829f | Prior to the monotheistic Yahweh, the gods made sense, in that they had familiar, if supra-human appetites--they didn't just want a lamb shank, they wanted the best lamb shank, wanted to seduce all the wood nymphs, and so on. But the early Jews invented a god with none of those desires, who was so utterly unfathomable, unknowable, as to be pants-wettingly terrifying. So even if His actions are mysterious, when He intervenes you at least get.. | god jewish | Robert M. Sapolsky | |
| d1df5ac | call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite. Similarly," | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| b2cb4f2 | Fear is the vigilance and the need to escape from something real. Anxiety is about dread and foreboding and your imagination running away with you. Much as with depression, anxiety is rooted in a cognitive distortion. In this case, people prone toward anxiety overestimate risks and the likelihood of a bad outcome. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 7a102ab | Archaeologists do something impressive, reflecting disciplinary humility. When archaeologists excavate a site, they recognize that future archaeologists will be horrified at their primitive techniques, at the destructiveness of their excavating. Thus they often leave most of a site untouched to await their more skillful disciplinary descendants. For example, astonishingly, more than forty years after excavations began, less than 1 percent o.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 2d5a7eb | Sustained stress has numerous adverse effects. The amygdala becomes overactive and more coupled to pathways of habitual behavior; it is easier to learn fear and harder to unlearn it. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 92c5841 | Obviously, oxytocin and vasopressin are the grooviest hormones in the universe. Pour them into the water supply, and people will be more charitable, trusting, and empathic. We'd be better parents and would make love, not war (mostly platonic love, though, since people in relationships would give wide berths to everyone else). Best of all, we'd buy all sorts of useless crap, trusting the promotional banners in stores once oxytocin starts spr.. | neurobiology | Robert M. Sapolsky | |
| 18b309b | Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, th.. | hunter-gatherers inequality war | Robert M. Sapolsky | |
| 941dee2 | Part of the reason for the evolutionary success of primates, human or otherwise, is that we are a pretty smart collection of animals. What's more, our thumbs work in particularly fancy and advantageous ways, and we're more flexible about food than most. But our primate essence is more than just abstract reasoning, dexterous thumbs, and omnivorous diets. Another key to our success must have something to do with this voluntary transfer proces.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| ba663f2 | In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 9796f4e | Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.13 Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 2102a2f | Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number in the hippocampus; sustained stress or glucocor-ticoid exposure does the opposite.7 Moreover, major depression or anxiety--two disorders associated with elevated glucocorticoid levels--can reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number. This arises from decreased levels of th.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| cf59c8a | testosterone's actions are contingent and amplifying, exacerbating preexisting tendencies toward aggression rather than creating aggression out of thin air. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 347f14f | If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression--the insular cortex processes gustatory disgust. Ditto for disgusting smells. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 17f999d | A remarkably consistent finding, starting with elementary school students, is that males are better at math than females. While the difference is minor when it comes to considering average scores, there is a huge difference when it comes to math stars at the upper extreme of the distribution. For example, in 1983, for every girl scoring in the highest percentile in the math SAT, there were 11 boys. Why the difference? There have always bee.. | gender genetics mathematics | Robert M. Sapolsky |