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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6901d6f | Ask yourself what is the point of advertising prescription drugs (antidepressant, anti-inflammatory, antiallergy, diet, ulcer--you name it) on prime-time television. We can't just go to the drugstore and buy them. The doctor must prescribe them. So why are drug companies investing big money to reach us, the consumers, directly? | Barry Schwartz | ||
| faa10a1 | As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, "Ads are what we know about the world around us." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 0026f40 | But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| c5f37f8 | But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual's pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if "constraint" sometimes affords a kind of liberation while "freedom" affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 56352b0 | The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| de712f6 | keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we've made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 5a83c81 | Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| c77201a | Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 692005c | Apparently we always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it. Meanwhile, the need to chose in ever more aspects of life causes us more distress than we realize. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 4563dbf | psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: "Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y....There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits." | Malcolm Gladwell | ||
| a622577 | That would be our luck. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| ec8d6d7 | To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way. | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 7c2ce70 | Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today," | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 211db09 | A soldier: "I know where heaven is and it's Lithuania ... The women are beautiful, pagan, with a practical view towards sex. Who says communism was bad? You're working three levels of advantages: you're a foreign male, you're a rich, exotic American, and their men are a bunch of drunken, criminal slobs." | humor lithuania soldiers women | Robert D. Kaplan | |
| a9d2db8 | The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa, | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 71a9fc8 | Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 4ceadb4 | The EU gave both political support and quotidian substance to the values inherent in NATO--those values being, generally, the rule of law over arbitrary fiat, legal states over ethnic nations, and the protection of the individual no matter his race or religion. Democracy, after all, is less about elections than about impartial institutions. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 41eab43 | For two thousand years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of modern-day Tunis) the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millennia ago, tribal identity based on nomadism--which the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun said disrupted political stability--is correspondingly weak. Indeed, after the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa reg.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 25e62c6 | The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation--and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that--with political order and stability. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| f4420d4 | Russia does not require an invasion, only a zone of influence in the Intermarium that it can achieve by gradually compromising the democratic vitality of rimland states. (Hungary, in particular, is well on its way in this regard.) | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| faa97c5 | Suppose I am told that a certain sample of wheat comes from Lahore, and that I do not know where Lahore is. I look it out in the gazetteer and ascertain that it is the capital of the Punjab.... If I know nothing of geography, I shall get up with the idea that Lahore is in India, and that will be about all. If I have been properly trained in geography, the word Punjab will ... probably connote to me many things. I shall see Lahore in the nor.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 70ec717 | The age of comparative anarchy is upon us. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| c427e05 | Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, and other minorities were generally safe within autocratic regimes such as Habsburg Austria and Ottoman Turkey but were killed or oppressed when these autocracies began giving birth to independent states dominated by ethnic majorities, such as Austria, Hungary, Romania, Greece, and Turkey. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| baac4b4 | It is the freedom to concentrate military equipment in key locations around the world that has preserved American military might. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 9f15689 | Discovering the inapplicability of Judeo-Christian morality in certain circumstances involving affairs of state can be searing. The rare individuals who have recognized the necessity of violating such morality, acted accordingly, and taken responsibility for their actions are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease .. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| b82342b | national navies tend to cooperate better than national armies, partly because sailors are united by a kind of fellowship-of-the-sea born of their shared experience facing violent natural forces. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 5b016cf | Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| f7f3059 | Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami condemned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the victims in the streets of Tehran...or the help Iran gave to the US-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghd.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| d7f52d6 | As Keyes noted, one bet soundly considered is preferable to many poorly understood. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 1c467fa | The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| f8c9ce1 | As Fama put it, "Life always has a fat tail." | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 52f43bf | I thought a lot about killing myself--it's a hobby today, | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 5c3e0b8 | Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives.. | english-history history | Simon Schama | |
| 634b8bf | The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the world of the village went from impoverished claustrophobia to traumatized infection. A hundred years later, everything had been upended, courtesy of King Death. | Simon Schama | ||
| 3344d58 | People judge. Fast | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 239da2d | Within this abstracted Southern culture, swamps remain tangible, physical spaces rather than simply collections of tropes. As Simon Schama, Donna Haraway, and others have claimed in a variety of ways, landscape is always, at least in part, a creation of culture-but the range and limits of that cultural creation are what interest the ecocritic. For W. G. T. Mitchell, in his 2002 book Landscape and Power, landscape becomes less a descriptive .. | Anthony Wilson | ||
| 6fdd589 | It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede. | Simon Schama | ||
| 17177f9 | The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut .. | Simon Schama | ||
| 218895e | Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, "It's too soon to tell." | Simon Schama | ||
| 972f62b | The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in crisis, the speaking scroll was designed to survive even incineration, because the scribes who had composed and edited it had memorised its oral traditions and its texts as part of their basic education. | Simon Schama | ||
| e9c0db9 | Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest or Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life | Walker Percy | ||
| bdc4ad6 | I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South. | Walker Percy | ||
| 124eb4c | The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the C.. | Walker Percy | ||
| 25e5aa4 | Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life...(How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?) | Walker Percy |