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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 56ba0b4 | Absolute, true, and mathematical time, for itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure for duration by means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year. | John Gribbin | ||
| 763d709 | For once you must try not to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts. | Bertolt Brecht | ||
| 978d1b0 | remembered how I was only a speck after all in uncomfortably limitless space, of no account whatever in the general scheme of things, but with a horrid private capacity for being often and easily hurt; and how specks have a trick of dying, which I in my turn would presently do, and a fresh speck, not nearly so nice, as I hoped and believed, would immediately start up and fill my vacancy, perhaps so exactly my vacancy that it would even wear.. | Elizabeth von Arnim | ||
| b9c9bfe | What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank? | Bertolt Brecht | ||
| 492d16e | As the author Julian Barnes observed, "[h]istory is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation" | JT Hunter | ||
| dc74750 | Throw off your grief,' such doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away. | Julian Barnes | ||
| c28c324 | Mr. Wurlitzer, I am now in a position to receive your organ. | Bertolt Brecht | ||
| c2b3804 | Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life. | Bertolt Brecht | ||
| 8865b7a | Science has only one commandment: contribution. | Bertolt Brecht | ||
| d36b001 | the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8ff09c7 | The cultural progress of the Species encountered impediments along the way. Overpopulation was a constant problem: as soon as the capacity of the local environment to support the population began to suffer, so individuals began to retreat from specialisation and exchange into defensive self-sufficiency, broadening their production and narrowing their consumption. This reduced the collective intelligence they could draw upon, which reduced t.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4c453ea | A propria palavra "seducao" implica mentira e manipulacao." | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1c2c41f | Uma das coisas mais fascinantes da raca humana e nao haver duas pessoas iguais. (...) No comportamento, tal como na aparencia, cada ser humano e unico. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7bdb6ca | The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c056701 | Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"20" | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7943212 | Self-sufficiency is another word for poverty." Matt Ridley TW: @" | Timothy Ferriss | ||
| 5fa8712 | La extraordinaria difusion del psicoanalisis entre 1920 y 1970 se debe mas al marketing que a los exitos terapeuticos. Al hablar con los enfermos sobre sus infancia, los analistas ofrecian una humanidad y simpatia hasta entonces inexistentes. Esto les hizo populares cuando las alternativas eran un sueno profundo a base de barbituricos, el coma insulinico, la lobotomia y las convulsiones provocadas por el choque electrico: todas ellas desagr.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3578922 | The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Matt Ridley elaborates: "'If I sew you a hide tunic today, you can sew me one tomorrow' brings limited rewards and diminishing returns. '[But] ... I make the clothes, you catch the food' brings increasing returns. Indeed, it has the beautiful property that it does not even need to be fair. For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal but.. | Peter H. Diamandis | ||
| abcb74a | Just as a white man has different skin color from a black man, so it is quite possible that he also has a somewhat different mind. But given what we know of evolution, it is not very likely. The evolutionary pressures that have shaped the human mind--principally competitive relations with kin members, tribal allies, and sexual partners--are and have been the same for white and black men and were at work before the ancestors of whites left A.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9731004 | If you attend a meeting of evolutionary biologists somewhere in America, you might be lucky and spot a tall, gray-whiskered, smiling man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, standing rather diffidently at the back of the crowd. He will probably be surrounded by a knot of admirers, hanging on his every word--for he is a man of few words. A whisper will go around the room: "George is here." You will sense from people's reactions.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| cf2b6c5 | The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design. Every living thing is "designed" quite unconsciously by the selective reproduction of its own ancestors to suit a particular life-style. Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, orig.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4ce41fd | Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger | Timothy Ferriss | ||
| 9637fc5 | This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ed669a1 | Sometimes the obvious can stare you in the face. Until 1955, it was agreed that human beings had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. It was just one of those facts that everybody knew was right. They knew it was right because in 1921 a Texan named Theophilus Painter had sliced thin sections off the testicles of two black men and one white man castrated for insanity and 'self-abuse', fixed the slices in chemicals and examined them under the mi.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 0eeca04 | A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e8bc6af | The filament of D N A is information, a message written in a code of chemicals, one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true, but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. Just like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a straight line. Just like written English, it is digital, in that every letter bears the same importance. Moreover, the language of DNA is considerably .. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f50b640 | The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1d11ef1 | On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY | Matt Ridley | ||
| 65a7da3 | Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 5117ed5 | So growth will resume - unless prevented by the wrong policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my life easier in the future. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a2ba582 | In civilized society,' wrote Adam Smith, an individual 'stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons. | Matt Ridley | ||
| bef74b4 | If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate. | Matt Ridley | ||
| ebb1e23 | Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top-down description of the world, and a top-down prescription by which we should live. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1984765 | there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 81b95a9 | the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e2fb469 | He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 19b098b | Lao Tzu saw this twenty-six centuries ago: 'The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.' Montesquieu's phrase for the calming effect of trade on human violence, intolerance and enmity was 'doux commerce' - sweet commerce. And he has been amply vindicated in the centuries since. The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved. Think of the Dutch after 1600, the Swedes after 1800,.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 6ca5dc9 | The idea that parents shape their children's personalities is so ingrained, and still supplies so many psychoanalysts with their livelihoods, that any challenge to it is bound to meet a lot of resistance. Yet the evidence has been getting more and more clear: variations in personality are determined by a combination of genes and random influences, but not by parents. The central premise of Freudian analysis - that childhood events cause adu.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7210b17 | Societies that chose 'normative monogamy', or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight. This made such societies more productive and less destructive, so they tended to expand at the expense of other societies. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 5b8816f | Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 5ac7ae3 | A large, interconnected population meant faster cumulative invention - a surprising truth even to this day, as Hong Kong and Manhattan islands demonstrate. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f9b1fc6 | The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology. Why pay huge fees to spend three years on one campus, earning the right to be paid not very much more in the real world than non-graduates, rather than putting together your own combination of online courses, marked and graded online, using the lectures of the best teachers in the field wherever they happen to be? | Matt Ridley | ||
| 5bcfbf4 | Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. NIALL FERGUSON | Matt Ridley | ||
| b381aab | The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation. | Matt Ridley |