2099 Quotations Found

The most underappreciated part of foreign policy is dealing with flawed partners.

Author: Ben Rhodes | Subjects: Foreign Policy, International, Politics & Public Policy

Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude.

Author: Anne Frank | Subjects: Concepts, Gratitude, Insight, Life & Society

Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and … [ Read more ]

Author: Rebecca Solnit | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. It doesn’t give a rat’s ass how your five senses interact with this world. […] We have competent people thinking about this stuff. We’re not just making shit up. One paper is not what makes a scientific truth. It has to be verified by competing groups, people that design experiments differently. Only if all … [ Read more ]

Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Subject: Math & Science

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.

Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Politics & Public Policy

Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.

Author: Pasi Sahlberg | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.

Author: Lao Tzu | Subjects: Insight, Personal Improvement

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.

Author: Sun Tzu | Subjects: Insight, Military | War | Peace

A young boy traveled across Japan to the school of a famous martial artist. When he arrived at the dojo he was given an audience by the sensei.
“What do you wish from me?” the master asked.
“I wish to be your student and be the finest karateka in the land,” the boy replied. “How long must I study?”
“Ten years at least,” the master answered.
“Ten years is … [ Read more ]

Author: Unknown | Subjects: Insight, Personal Improvement

A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and the strong will … [ Read more ]

Author: Lao Tzu | Subjects: Insight, Personal Improvement

In order to achieve victory you must place yourself in your opponent’s skin. If you don’t understand yourself, you will lose one hundred percent of the time. If you understand yourself you will win fifty percent of the time. If you understand yourself and your opponent, you will win one hundred percent of the time.

Author: Tustomu Oshima | Subjects: Military | War | Peace, Personal Improvement

We are not taught how to take advantage of a diverse thought—diverse in the sense that your thought conflicts with mine—rather than saying, “I have an idea. Yours is different than mine. I must make sure mine triumphs,” which is generally what we’re taught to do, to advocate for our point of view. We’re not going to get where we need to be on diversity … [ Read more ]

Author: Roger Martin | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years. And [we] underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Author: Bill Gates | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Psychology | Behavior

Millennia of evolution have hardly allayed our preference for anecdote over probability — a failure to internalize mathematical rules known in psychology as the description‐experience gap, leading to what the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has memorably described as our tendency to draw our confidence in our beliefs not from the quality of the evidence but from the coherence of the story we have constructed. Numberless … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Our experiences trump everything else, but mostly, those experiences are incredibly skewed: they teach us, but they don’t teach us well. It’s why disentangling chance from skill is so difficult in everyday decisions: it’s a statistical undertaking, and one we are not normally equipped to deal with.

Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Some of us imbue probability with emotion. It becomes luck: chance that has suddenly acquired a valence, positive or negative, fortuitous or unfortunate. Good or bad luck. A lucky or unlucky break. Some of us invest luck with meaning, direction, and intent. It becomes fate, karma, kismet — chance with an agenda. It was meant to be. Some even go a step further: predestination. It … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior

A basic shortcoming of our neural wiring is that we can’t quite grasp probabilities. Statistics are completely counterintuitive: our brains are simply not cut out, evolutionarily, to understand that inherent uncertainty. There were no numbers or calculations in our early environment — just personal experience and anecdote. We didn’t learn to deal with information presented in an abstract fashion, such as tigers are incredibly rare … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Math & Science, Psychology | Behavior

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Konnikova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Although we cannot deliberately evoke that will-o’-the-wisp, chance, we can be on the alert for it, prepare ourselves to recognize it and profit by it when it comes.

Author: W. I. B. Beveridge | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

The problem with materialism is not that it exists, but that it dominates.

Author: Justin Welby | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Material Possessions