High Contrast Quotes & Sayings

These findings stand in sharp contrast to the belief in "American exceptionalism" that once dominated US sociology, according to which social mobility in the United States was exceptionally high compared with the class-bound societies of Europe. No doubt the settler society of the early nineteenth century was more mobile. As I have shown, moreover, inherited wealth played a smaller role in the United States than in Europe, and US wealth was for a long time less concentrated, at least up to World War I. Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. — Thomas Piketty

being then just dinner-time, we went, first into the great kitchen, where every prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out separately (to be handed to him in his cell), with the regularity and precision of clock-work. I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well. But I learned that the 'system' required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on all others, 'the system' put an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system, but THE system, to be considered. — Charles Dickens

Instead of focusing on getting more resources, tipping point leaders concentrate on multiplying the value of the resources they have. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources, on the one hand, and multiply the value of resources, on the other. These are hot spots, cold spots, and horse trading. Hot spots are activities that have low resource input but high potential performance gains. In contrast, cold spots are activities that have high resource input but low performance impact. In every organization, hot spots and cold spots typically abound. Horse trading involves trading your unit's excess resources in one area for another unit's excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps. By learning to use their current resources right, companies often find they can tip the resource hurdle outright. What — W.Chan Kim

Women feel like we're fat if we can't wear the clothes we wore in high school. Men, in contrast, only start to feel fat only when they can no longer fit into a foreign car. — Gina Barreca

By contrast, a modern person lives surrounded by strangers who are doing things they may not understand. We cannot rely on our instincts and our relationships to keep society working. So it's more important than ever to make sure that we get the rules right. If we want our economy to grow, it means looking for ways to support experimental risk-taking by trading a little more than we may instinctively be comfortable with. It means offering big payoffs to those who are willing to take big risks but also making sure that the unlucky don't starve. In short, it means accepting that a high degree of unpredictability goes with the hunting ground. — Megan McArdle

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality. — Walter Jon Williams

The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption ... The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn't, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green. — Peter W. Huber

Erich Fromm in his 1941 book "Escape from Freedom", about the nature of one of our culture's most cherished values. Fromm argues that freedom is composed of two complementary parts. A common view of freedom is that it means "freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men," which defines it as the absence of others forcibly interfering with the pursuit of our goals. In contrast to this "freedom from," Fromm identifies an alternate sense of freedom as an ability: the "freedom to" attain certain outcomes and realize our full potential. "Freedom from" and "freedom to" don't always go together, but one must be free in both senses to obtain full benefit from choice. A child may be allowed to have a cookie, but he won't get it if he can't reach the cookie jar high on the shelf. — Sheena Iyengar

Go uses garbage collection (GC). Generally, people have one of two reactions to this. If you come from a high-level language, like Java, C#, Ruby, Python, or Smalltalk, then your reaction is likely to be "So what? It's a standard language feature these days." People coming from C or C++, in contrast, tend to regard GC as a decadent luxury and a sign of incompetence among programmers in general. Oh, and they also want you to get off their lawn. — David Chisnall

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud" goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside. — James W. Loewen

Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them. Pg. 193 — Nien Cheng

The breadfruit is a superb tree, about 60 feet high, with deep green, shining leaves, a foot broad, sharply and symmetrically cut, worthy, from their exceeding beauty of form, to take the place of the acanthus in architectural ornament, and throwing their pale green fruit into delicate contrast. — Isabella Bird

When we look closely, not only at what Jesus taught but at how he went about disseminating his message, time and again we find that what he was preaching was the gospel of a partnership society. He rejected the dogma that high-ranking men - in Jesus' day, priests, nobles, rich men, and kings - are the favorites of God. He mingled freely with women, thus openly rejecting the male-supremacist norms of his time. And in sharp contrast to the views of later Christian sages, who actually debated whether woman has an immortal soul, Jesus did not preach the ultimate dominator message: that women are spiritually inferior to men. — Riane Eisler

our contemporary ideas about manliness, reflected in action movies and westerns, generally prohibit so-called real men from displaying high emotion, with the exception of anger. John Wayne doesn't cry. By contrast, Achilles, the epitome of manliness in Homer's Iliad, weeps openly and at length over the loss of his friend Patroclus. — Thomas Van Nortwick

System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; "spare capacity" is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they followed that instruction, because the timing of the visual target had no effect on the main task. If the critical letter was presented at a time of high demand, the subjects simply did not see it. When the transformation task was less demanding, detection performance was better. — Daniel Kahneman

Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information. Typography should not vary widely in an interface. — Alan Cooper

My mother was a high-strung perfectionist. She would check my homework for the slightest imperfection and demand that it be redone if she detected any flaws, which she invariably did. My father, in contrast, was easy going and affable and delighted in helping me with any project. — Robert Lefkowitz

I love all men and women. I am a lover of humanity, not a hater. ... I have been immoral, drunk, high. I ran with the wicked people for 28 years and I have run with the Jesus people since and the contrast is astounding. — Phil Robertson

Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names - crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That's concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened 'once upon a time. — Lee Strobel

Estimates suggest that from 20 to 50 million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death. By contrast, aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year. — Frances M. Young

Many point to the rising percentage of younger adult "nones" in the United States as evidence for the inevitable shrinkage of religion. However, Kaufmann shows that almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones. Secularization, he writes, "mainly erodes . . . the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established."67 Therefore, the very "liberal, moderate" forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.68 — Timothy J. Keller

In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention. — Rowan Williams

For worship is, essentially, the reverse of sin. Sin began (and begins) when we succumb to the temptation, "You shall be as gods." We make ourselves the center of the universe and dethrone God. By contrast, worship is giving God his true worth; it is acknowledging Him to be the Lord of all things, and the Lord of everything in our lives. He is, indeed, the Most High God! — Sinclair B. Ferguson

I love contrast in music. Being inspired by classical, actually - in high school especially - classical and metal both, I remember having this cool realization that they are really similar. It's just different instrumentation. — Amy Lee

More advice: if your message is to be printed, use high-quality paper to maximize the contrast between characters and their background. If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue. — Daniel Kahneman

Male love circuits get an extra kick when stress levels are high. After an intense physical challenge, for instance, males will bond quickly and sexually with the first willing female they lay eyes on.
Women, by contrast, will rebuff advances or expressions of affection and desire when under stress. The reason may be that the stress hormone cortisol blocks oxytocin's action in the female brain, abruptly shutting off a woman's desire for sex and physical touch. — Louann Brizendine

To the extent that genomes can be thought of as compressed encodings of biological structures, they are spectacularly efficient. All the trillions of cells in the human body-not just the tens of billions in the brain-are guided in one way or another by the information contained in 30,000 or so genes. The best high-quality set of pictures of the body- the National Institutes of Health Visible Human Project, a series of high-resolution digital photos of slices taken from volunteer Joseph Paul Jernigan (deceased)-takes up about 60 gigabytes, enough (if left uncompressed) to fill about 100 CD-ROMs-and still not enough detail to capture individual cells. The genome, in contrast, contains only about 3 billion nucleotides, the equivalent (at two bits per nucleotide) of less than two-thirds of a gigabyte, or a single CD-ROM. — Gary F. Marcus

Modulation and processing of the range of sensory experiences allows for social engagement and attachment to others. A person who is easily overwhelmed by sounds, touch, movement, or visual stimulation may avoid interactions with
persons or situations that are highly stimulating. In contrast, the person who does not process sensory input unless it is very intense may develop a pattern of thrill seeking, high stimulation, and risky behavior. — Georgia A. Degangi

For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man. — Hilaire Belloc

Margaret in contrast held her head high, her cheeks flagged with a becoming rose color. She looked like a goddess enraged. A goddess who might, if they were alone, assault his person
the thought of which unaccountably aroused him. — Elizabeth Hoyt

All humans possess a built-in motivation to stay away from people with low or negative social value. In contrast, we may vastly improve our chances for survival and replication if we proactively seek out and form partnerships, both sexual and nonsexual, with those who offer us a high survival-and-replication value ... we are hardwired to seek alignment with them.
We may draw value from other people by influencing them to help us, but in a fair exchange, we must work to improve their chances as well. If one were to take too much from the other person, he or she would lower the other's chances of survival and replication. — Mystery

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.) — Robert C. Solomon