Cerebrally Quick Quotes & Sayings

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful. — Rae Armantrout

He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state and wishes to have it accepted, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities. — Niccolo Machiavelli

What conditions are usually necessary for outgroups to be mistreated? Activation of a
social identity leads to such negative outcomes after two conditions are met. First, ingroup members must believe that a common set of norms and values apply to both themselves and to members of the outgroup. Second, the ingroup must see its values as the only acceptable values, so that their values overwhelm those of the outgroup and are the ones that should guide both themselves and the outgroup. The combination of these two factors leads the ingroup to perceive members of the outgroup as deviant, morally inferior, and a potential threat to ingroup values. — Kristin J. Anderson

Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live. — Jonathan Swift

Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process. — Martin Scorsese

The Google model of targeted advertising is appealing because it claims to cut down on waste. We need to ask how that efficiency can be brought to creative process. — Jerry Della Femina

How much soccer training is it needed to become a top player? It depends on the efficiency of your training routine. Setting long and short-term goals is a must. When planning out a soccer training regime, one must strive for realistic and consistent program that will diminish specific weaknesses. Broad versatility of soccer skills is the Nirvana of every dedicated trainee. — Pele

Even-money that my liver lasts through my wife's metamorphosis to my mother-in-law. — Tim Heaton

After I took Lisa's braces off, we climbed out of my bedroom window onto the roof of the porch below, smoked cigarettes in our nightgowns, and talked about boys. If I had tried that summer to imagine what my future would look like, it would have been as much a mystery to me then as my own reflection in those cutoff shorts. This is what I understand now that I could not have seen then: When you grow up in a home where nobody goes to work, where nobody is married, in a place where there are few jobs and few opportunities, you do not stay up late whispering about weddings and college and careers. You live in that moment, or maybe in the next; you do not make decisions that will impact a future that you do not let yourself imagine; you do not make a plan beyond your next pack of cigarettes. — Heather Ross

To invoke an analogy, consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures. Isn't it the same with life? Doesn't the final meaning of life, too reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death? And doesn't this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of their respective individual's knowledge and belief? — Victor Frankl

If the wine drinker has a deep gentleness in him, he will show that when drunk. But if he has hidden anger and arrogance, those appear. — Rumi

And to what end?" she asked sharply. "If you are, as I understand, to shut yourself forever in your cell within the four walls of an abbey, then of what use would it be were your prayer to be answered?" "The use of my own salvation." She turned from him with a pretty shrug and wave. "Is that all?" she said. "Then you are no better than Father Christopher and the rest of them. Your own, your own, ever your own! My father is the king's man, and when he rides into the press of fight he is not thinking ever of the saving of his own poor body; he recks little enough if he leave it on the field. Why then should you, who are soldiers of the Spirit, be ever moping or hiding in cell or in cave, with minds full of your own concerns, while the world, which you should be mending, is going on its way, and neither sees nor hears you? Were ye all as thoughtless of your own souls as the soldier is of his body, ye would be of more avail to the souls of others." "There — Arthur Conan Doyle