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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1ee8577 | In friendships . . . the requisits are always the same. Each provides the other with a refuge in time of trouble, with a continuum to fall back on in time of self-doubt, with an underpinning of earned trust upon which it is possible to build new achievements. | Gail Godwin | ||
| 114bc03 | said, "but the school board--" He opened his arms in a helpless sweep. "If I can help . . ." The following Wednesday the bells of the chapel did not ring, and when the old women" -- | Ursula Hegi | ||
| bc43058 | it only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life--not the life of a stranger as I had imagined--but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again. | Ursula Hegi | ||
| 7568970 | We Germans have a history of sacrificing everything for one strong leader," her father had said. "It's our fear of chaos." | Ursula Hegi | ||
| 2cd14d6 | And yet, just because a story was a certain way didn't mean it would always be like that: stories took their old shape with them and fused it with the new shape. She didn't understand yet how all the tangles of their lives would sort themselves out in her story, but she supposed it would be like raking: not every bit of earth would be untangled at once. | Ursula Hegi | ||
| 06a76d6 | With the stories of people she'd known since her childhood it was like that: one incident in their lives might come to an ending, but others would lead into new veins, and what was fascinating was to look at the whole of it and discern a pattern, a way of being, that had shaped those passages. | Ursula Hegi | ||
| 357cf58 | These are things," Trudi's father told her long before she was old enough for confession, "that the church calls sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing--" He paused. "--is to be kind." | Ursula Hegi | ||
| 6bf1325 | Because of the people in history, Trudi felt a far stronger link than ever before to the people in her town, and from all this grew new stories, which she told to Eva and her father, and to Frau Abramowitz who listened to every word and sighed, "Trudi, you and your splendid imagination." | Ursula Hegi | ||
| bb9348f | Trudi's gift lay in knowing. Knowing the words that named the thoughts inside people's minds, the words that masked the fears and secrets inside their hearts. To force their secrets to the surface like water farts and let them rip through the silence. They called her a snoop, a meddler. But even though she was more inconvenient to them than ever before, they kept coming back--to borrow books, they liked to believe--yet, what they really cam.. | Ursula Hegi | ||
| bc8ee02 | The risk her stories posed to others--and to herself--was more subtle. When she was younger, she had used secrets as if they were currency, but she'd found out how secrets could use her instead by becoming stronger than she. It happened whenever she couldn't stay away from a secret--drawn to it the way Georg Weiler was drawn to the bottle--though she sensed it would be better for her not to know. | Ursula Hegi | ||
| d4bfcfa | Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to mass unemployment in the long run. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| c115a49 | Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has of.. | Michelle Alexander | ||
| 3e710d6 | The product of careful continuity is love....Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 329370e | i began to see that i had commodified myself.... i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. | Fred Turner | ||
| 1efa6bb | Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space becomes completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 1128688 | More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now. | Stewart Brand | ||
| b6beaf3 | It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay). | Stewart Brand | ||
| 305a19d | We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust. An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that hu.. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 92e803c | Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic .. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 83eb62a | What does it take to build something so that it's really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you've made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care. | Stewart Brand | ||
| e3a53c6 | I'm a lifelong environmentalist. My voice piped at age ten: "I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country--its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife." I got infected by that Conservation Pledge through the magazine Outdoor Life and proceeded to paste it on everything and everyone around me. Since the concept of pledge has long been rendered meaningless b.. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 5df9459 | Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, s.. | Stewart Brand | ||
| e1938fd | for the next century could raise the world's temperature some 4degC (7.2degF), bringing serious coastal flooding and other damage." The Conservation Foundation urged renewed funding for Keeling's CO 2 project and pressed the National Academy of Sciences to pay attention to the subject. From then on, awareness of climate change ascended right along with the Keeling Curve. In 1971 Barry Commoner's environmentalist bestseller, The Closing Circ.. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 8096f1d | At present, the best low-carbon source is nuclear. | Stewart Brand | ||
| a616e83 | Science has long informed the environmental movement. Now it must take the lead, because we are forced to enter an era of large-scale ecosystem engineering, and we have to know what the hell we're doing. That sermon gets a chapter. Beavers are benevolent ecosystem engineers; so are soil-enriching earthworms; so were American Indians, who terraformed a continent; so are all of us who work on restoring natural infrastructure. A chapter on tha.. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 3b642cd | Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.) | Stewart Brand | ||
| 827ec34 | Eternity is the opposite of a long time. | Stewart Brand | ||
| 686b1f5 | When Brian Eno approached the father of Anthea Norman-Taylor for permission to marry her, he was told, "What you have to ask yourself is, 'Would I wish this woman to be the grandmother of my grandchildren?" | Stewart Brand | ||
| aeb8368 | As a rule of thumb, the sample size must be at least 30 for the central limit theorem to hold true.) This | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 3c1f515 | Bateson proposed that the metaphor of "mother Earth" is no longer accurate or helpful. Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it were our first child. It will be here after us. Its future is unknown and uncontrollable. We are forced to plan ahead for it. Our first obligation is to keep it from harm. We are learning from it how to be decent parents." | Stewart Brand | ||
| b42f379 | During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 7be5d05 | Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 6e96cae | what economic benefit smokers provide for nonsmokers (they die earlier, leaving more Social Security and pension benefits for the rest of us), | Charles Wheelan | ||
| fc304a8 | Consider a nonstatistics example: Did the U.S. invasion of Iraq make America safer? There is only one intellectually honest answer: We will never know. The reason we will never know is that we do not know--and cannot know--what would have happened if the United States had not invaded Iraq. True, the United States did not find weapons of mass destruction. But it is possible that on the day after the United States did not invade Iraq Saddam H.. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 54470c4 | the most dangerous kind of job stress stems from having "low control" over one's responsibilities." | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 5f23ea3 | Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 9d2c2ce | The authors propose "a New Deal for globalization--one thatlinks engagement with the world economy to a substantial redistribution of income." Remember, this isn't hippy talk. These are the capitalists who see angry workers with pitchforks loitering outside the gates of a very profitable factory, and they are making a very pragmatic calculation: Throw these people some food (and maybe some movie tickets and beer) before we all end up worse .. | welfare | Charles Wheelan | |
| f8e45b2 | North | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 08cacfb | The [Value at Risk model] was like a faulty speedometer, which is arguably worse than no speedometer at all. If you place too much faith in the broken speedometer, you will be oblivious to other signs that your speed is unsafe. In contrast, if there is no speedometer at all, you have no choice but to look around for clues as to how fast you are really going. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| f1679a7 | Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| af897cb | The good news is that these descriptive statistics give us a manageable and meaningful summary of the underlying phenomenon. That's what this chapter is about. The bad news is that any simplification invites abuse. Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 0d234bb | If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly. | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 3e962b2 | Is the journey still worthwhile if the mountain turns out to be enshrouded in fog at the top? | Charles Wheelan | ||
| 8def26a | Change is inevitable; but progress depends on what we do with that change. | Charles Wheelan |