Venkatesh Quotes & Sayings

Reflection is a dangerous pastime. It can lead you to rewrite your past, alter how you see your present, and tempt you down paths you never imagined you would explore. — Venkatesh G. Rao

So revenge is obviously a deeply messed-up expression of vindictiveness. It is hard to even call it "evil." It is just plain insanity. A result of deeply messed-up thinking. — Venkatesh G. Rao

learning helps us increase our store of usable information and lower risk. — Venkatesh G. Rao

Most people recognize that many blue-collar jobs pay more than white-collar jobs. Few act on that recognition. — Venkatesh G. Rao

It was brave of them to love again. It made me think I could do it too. — Ally Condie

If you're disciplining yourself to constantly be at the intersection of many divergent streams of intellectual influence, it's like creating a check and balance set of forces for yourself. You don't need to make independence of thought an act of willpower. You don't need to be like a Marcus Aurelius sort of strong willed high virtue type of person in order to have an independent mind; you have an independent mind my listening to many different people constantly. — Venkatesh Rao

But his graduate advisor, the eminent poverty scholar William Julius Wilson, promptly sent Venkatesh into the field. His assignment: to visit Chicago's poorest black neighborhoods with a clipboard and a seventy-question, multiple-choice survey. This was the first question on the survey: How do you feel about being black and poor? a. Very bad b. Bad c. Neither bad nor good d. Somewhat good e. Very good — Steven D. Levitt

The leader of another crack gang once told Venkatesh that he could easily afford to pay his foot soldiers more, but it wouldn't be prudent. "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig?" he said. "So, you know, you try to take care of them, but you know, you also have to show them you the boss. You always have to get yours first, or else you really ain't no leader. If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit. — Steven D. Levitt

But the Word of God should shape our perspective, not circumstances or current events. So, — David S. Steele

What critics miss, however, is that there is no such thing as non-narrative thought, free of possible worlds and ongoing enactments. There are always multiple narratives at work, framing our perceptions, memories, active thoughts, decisions and actions. — Venkatesh G. Rao

The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. — Venkatesh G. Rao

Knowledge does not equate to intelligence. It is the application of knowledge that separates the genius from the fool. — Niquenya D. Fulbright

As writers like to remark, books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. This acceptance of necessary expediency leads to the increasing doubt and anxiety characteristic of the last hours before the first significant encounter with reality: the separation event. — Venkatesh G. Rao

Your most stable beliefs, the ones that actually modulate your behavior, aren't about life purposes; they are about momentum management. You are more likely to switch religions than to switch from an impatient to a patient temperament. — Venkatesh G. Rao

Your terrain is the tortuous maze of truth-avoidance paths worn out by the "be somebody" types, and paved by the medal-awarding priests. Your mission is to tackle head-on, the truths that they work hard to avoid. Your own twists and turns are about avoiding or outmaneuvering those who want to deny truths and defend obvious falsehoods. — Venkatesh G. Rao

for every complex question, there is an answer that is simple, elegant and wrong. — Venkatesh G. Rao

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that. — C.S. Lewis

Whenever anyone pulls out of the race, you know, unless they've just been trounced in the days before, there's also - always a lot of questions about why that happened. — Elizabeth Edwards

I'm not sure I'm ready for another big research project just yet," I said.
Oh Yeah?" he said, handing me one of the beers. "What else you going to do? You can't fix nothing , you never worked a day in your life. The only thing you know how to do is hang out with niggers like us."
I nearly choked on my beer when he summarized my capacities so succinctly - and, for the most part accurately. — Sudhir Venkatesh

truth is also about increasing moral minimalism. As you learn more, you should have less need for moral opinions. Or — Venkatesh G. Rao

So endgames are naturally messy.

They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that's what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control. — Venkatesh G. Rao

beliefs create or constrain possibilities, desires lead to preferences among them, and intentions represent commitments to specific courses of action. Each of the primitive elements can evolve in time, which is why mental models have momentum. — Venkatesh G. Rao

My father said to me when I was a child, 'Boy, set there until I come back.' That was his law and I had to obey him. He went off somewhere and forgot about me. I sat there all day waiting for my father and almost got a stroke from the sun.
I said to my son one time, 'Boy, set there until I come back.' You know what he said to me? 'For what?'
You're not going to cram down the throats of today's youth what got crammed down my father's. Young people want to know the facts now. — Vaunda Micheaux Nelson

To be slightly evil is to embrace life. — Venkatesh G. Rao