12 Rules for Life quotes
"Lobsters have more in common with you than you might think (particularly when you are feeling crabby—ha ha). "
"The determination of Who’s Who in the chicken world has important implications for each individual bird’s survival, particularly in times of scarcity. "
"The poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. "
"Lobsters, scuttling around on the ocean floor, are no exception. If you catch a few dozen, and transport them to a new location, you can observe their status-forming rituals and techniques. "
"If the two lobsters are very close in size and apparent ability, however, or if the exchange of liquid has been insufficiently informative, they will proceed to dispute resolution Level 2. "
"A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. "
"The same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain—indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. "
"Back to the fractious shellfish: it doesn't take that long before lobsters, testing each other out, learn who can be messed with and who should be given a wide berth—and once they have learned, the resultant hierarchy is exceedingly stable. "
"The female lobsters (who also fight hard for territory during the explicitly maternal stages of their existence14) identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It’s also one used by females of many different species, including humans. "
"A third of a billion years ago, brains and nervous systems were comparatively simple. Nevertheless, they already had the structure and neurochemistry necessary to process information about status and society. "
"It is for this reason that the wings of bats, the hands of human beings, and the fins of whales look astonishingly alike in their skeletal form. They even have the same number of bones. "
"In my kingdom, as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. "
"The order within the chaos and order of Being is all the more natural the longer it has lasted. "
"The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. "
"When operating at the bottom, the ancient brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an uncontrollable chain of negative events, which will have to be handled alone, as useful friends are rare indeed, on society’s fringes. "
"Routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity. "
"Something similar often happens to people who develop an anxiety disorder, such as agoraphobia. People with agoraphobia can become so overwhelmed with fear that they will no longer leave their homes. "
"Anxiety-induced retreat makes everything retreated from more anxiety-inducing. "
"The dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. "
"Even the toughest of six-year-olds is no match for someone who is nine. "
"When naive people discover the capacity for anger within themselves, they are shocked, sometimes severely. "
"If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. "
"So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. "
"Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement. "
"It’s seriously not good to have your kidneys fail. Dialysis is no picnic. "
"And God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. "
"Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things. "
"Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. "
"In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm and competent. "
"Something unexpected or undesired can always make its appearance, when a plan is being laid out, regardless of how familiar the circumstances. "
"Order and chaos are not understood first, objectively (as things or objects), and then personified. That would only be the case if we perceived objective reality first, and then inferred intent and purpose. "
"Our minds are far older than mere humanity. Our categories are far older than our species. "
"We already know all this, but we don’t know we know it. But we immediately comprehend it when it’s articulated in a manner such as this. "
"Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation (even every conceivable lived situation) is made up of both. "
"In the third verse of Genesis, a serpent appears—first, apparently, in legged form. God only knows why He allowed—or placed—such a creature in the garden. "
"The importance of this symbolic identification—its staggering brilliance—can hardly be overstated. It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed. "
"Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it's no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise. "
"And there's more. It's fruit that the snake offers, and fruit is also associated with a transformation of vision, in that our ability to see color is an adaptation that allows us to rapidly detect the ripe and therefore edible bounty of trees. "
"What are we to do about that. Abandon all ideals of beauty, health, brilliance and strength. That’s not a good solution. "
"The first woman made the first man self-conscious and resentful. Then the first man blamed the woman. And then the first man blamed God. "
"Merely descriptive. Merely. "
"But if you are not yet convinced, let us consider another vital issue. Order, chaos, life, death, sin, vision, work and suffering: that is not enough for the authors of Genesis, nor for humanity itself. "
"Only man can conceive of the rack, the iron maiden and the thumbscrew. Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate. "
"Who then when ill, is going to be fully committed to his own care. "
"The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is paradisal. "
"If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth—then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. "
"What good is that. It much better for any relationship when both partners are strong. "
"Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. "
"You have to determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don't end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. "
"He whose life has a why can bear almost any how. "
"In Fairview, Alberta, during the five months of winter, long stretches of forty-below days and even colder nights were the norm. "
"Every time Chris crashed his truck, his father would fix it, and buy him something else. He had a motorbike and a van for selling ice cream. He did not care for his motorbike. He sold no ice cream. He often expressed dissatisfaction with his father and their relationship. "
"If we weren’t driving in town, we were driving in the countryside. "
"The lights were kept low. That kept self-consciousness to a minimum. The over-loud music made conversation impossible. There was little to talk about in any case. There were always a couple of the town psychopaths attending. Everybody drank and smoked too much. "
"When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. "
"I saw an even more egregious example of this a few years later. I had moved to Edmonton to finish my undergraduate degree. I took an apartment with my sister, who was studying to be a nurse. She was also an up-and-out-of-there person. "
"Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. "
"When it's not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism. "
"The inflated self-importance, carelessness and sheer malevolence of the underground man dashes Liza’s last hopes. "
"Down is a lot easier than up. "
"In my experience—clinical and otherwise—it’s just never been that simple. "
"Maybe your misery is the weapon you brandish in your hatred for those who rose upward while you waited and sank. Maybe your misery is your attempt to prove the world’s injustice, instead of the evidence of your own sin, your own missing of the mark, your conscious refusal to strive and to live. "
"It's appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve. "
"It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent. "
"The winners don't take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be. "
"If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse. "
"When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here's how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. "
"When do you dislike your parents, your spouse, or your children, and why. What might be done about that. What do you need and want from your friends and your business partners. This is not a mere matter of what you should want. "
"You're a singular being, once you're an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise. Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. "
"We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. "
"Where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. "
"What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward. "
"The dependency of sight on aim (and, therefore, on value—because you aim at what you value) was demonstrated unforgettably by the cognitive psychologist Daniel Simons more than fifteen years ago. "
"Since you’ve ignored so much, there is plenty of possibility left where you have not yet looked. "
"Before your crisis impels you to that hideous conclusion, however, you might consider the following: life doesn't have the problem. You do. "
"What would your life look like, if it were better. What would Life Itself look like. What does better even mean. You don’t know. "
"The viewpoints, methods and practices of science hadn't been formulated when the Bible was written. Religion is instead about proper behaviour. "
"It is therefore necessary and desirable for religions to have a dogmatic element. What good is a value system that does not provide a stable structure. What good is a value system that does not point the way to a higher order. "
"The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil). "
"The God of the Old Testament can appear harsh, judgmental, unpredictable and dangerous, particularly on cursory reading. The degree to which this is true has arguably been exaggerated by Christian commentators, intent on magnifying the distinction between the older and newer divisions of the Bible. "
"But how can you do all this. —assuming you are foolish enough to try. "
"What is it that is bothering me. Is that something I could fix. Would I actually be willing to fix it. "
"Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith. "
"Aim at the highest good. "
"When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. "
"If circumstances force you to put all your eggs into one basket, so to speak, a son is a better bet, by the strict standards of evolutionary logic, where the proliferation of your genes is all that matters. "
"The things you can see, with even a single open eye. "
"When the idealized image of an unsullied child is brought to mind, this notion appears fully justified. "
"Better this than the reverse, you might argue—but there are catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum. "
"It has been said that every individual is the conscious or unconscious follower of some influential philosopher. The belief that children have an intrinsically unsullied spirit, damaged only by culture and society, is derived in no small part from the eighteenth-century Genevan French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "
"The !Kung bushmen of Africa, romanticized in the 1950s by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas as the harmless people,92 had a yearly murder rate of 40 per 100,000, which declined by more than 30% once they became subject to state authority. "
"Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by abuse, mental or physical. This is damage by omission, rather than commission, but it is no less severe and long-lasting. "
"It is difficult to pay careful attention to children. It is difficult to figure out what is wrong and what is right and why. It is difficult to formulate just and compassionate strategies of discipline, and to negotiate their application with others deeply involved in a child’s care. "
"It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned. "
"The little blighter would only eat three or four mouthfuls. Then he would play. "
"A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old, hard as that is to believe. "
"He was getting tired. He was ready to capitulate. He closed his eyes. I got to my feet, and headed quietly and quickly to the door. I glanced back, to check his position, one last time. He was back on his feet. "
"Behavioural psychologists like B. F. Skinner believed that rewarding good behaviour can be very effective. "
"The same goes for husbands, wives, co-workers and parents. "
"Something existentially similar to this often occurs very frequently with overprotected children, who can be brought low—and then desire the bliss of unconsciousness—by their first real contact with failure or, worse, genuine malevolence, which they do not or will not understand and against which they have no defence. "
"Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from fear and pain. "
"It is fortunate indeed that in the face of such variability we are the beneficiaries of much thoughtful meditation on the proper use of social control. "
"Limit the rules to what, exactly. : Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don't end up in jail. "
"What's the alternative. A child who is crying angrily, demanding attention, is not making himself popular. "
"There is no excuse for physical punishment, and the penalties for misbehavior (of the sort that could have been effectively halted in childhood) become increasingly severe as children get older. "
"What no means, in the final analysis, is always If you continue to do that, something you do not like will happen to you. Otherwise it means nothing. "
"An angry child should sit by himself until he calms down. Then he should be allowed to return to normal life. That means the child wins—instead of his anger. "
"Beware. There are toxic families everywhere. They make no rules and limit no misbehaviour. The parents lash out randomly and unpredictably. The children live in that chaos and are crushed, if they’re timid, or rebel, counterproductively, if they’re tough. "
"It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. "
"If their actions make you dislike them, think what an effect they will have on other people, who care much less about them than you. "
"People who think such things view Being itself as inequitable and harsh to the point of corruption, and human Being, in particular, as contemptible. They appoint themselves supreme adjudicators of reality and find it wanting. "
"Only unusually strong and logically consistent people act in this manner. "
"Who would dare say that this is not the worm at the core of the apple. "
"Why is there so much suffering and cruelty. "
"Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. "
"If it's her fault, she might be able to do something about it. "
"He opened his eyes, instead. During his many trials, Solzhenitsyn encountered people who comported themselves nobly, under horrific circumstances. He contemplated their behavior deeply. Then he asked himself the most difficult of questions: had he personally contributed to the catastrophe of his life. If so, how. "
"When the hurricane hit New Orleans, and the town sank under the waves, was that a natural disaster. The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred. "
"If the answer is no, here's something to try: Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. "
"Perhaps you will discover that your now less-corrupted soul, much stronger than it might otherwise have been, is now able to bear those remaining, necessary, minimal, inescapable tragedies. "
"Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. "
"In this manner, the information that was first only embedded in our behaviour became represented in our stories. But we didn’t and still don’t understand what it all means. "
"The future: that’s where you go to die (hopefully, not too soon). "
"Sacrifices are necessary, to improve the future, and larger sacrifices can be better. "
"So how was it that those two impossible and necessarily simultaneous accomplishments (delay and the stabilization of society into the future) could possibly have manifested themselves. "
"It's better to have something than nothing. It's better yet to share generously the something you have. It's even better than that, however, to become widely known for generous sharing. That's something that lasts. That's something that's reliable. "
"The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. "
"Sometimes things do not go well. That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals. "
"When he attempted specifically to consider strategies that would produce acquittal by fair means or foul—or even when merely considering his potential actions at the trial—he found himself interrupted by his divine sign: his internal spirit, voice or daemon. "
"Because his ever-reliable internal voice objected to fleeing (or even to defending himself) Socrates radically altered his view of the significance of his trial. "
"The tragedy of self-conscious Being produces suffering, inevitable suffering. That suffering in turn motivates the desire for selfish, immediate gratification—for expediency. But sacrifice—and work—serves far more effectively than short-term impulsive pleasure at keeping suffering at bay. "
"If someone fails and is rejected because he refused to make any sacrifices at all—well, that's at least understandable. He may still feel resentful and vengeful, but knows in his heart that he is personally to blame. "
"Evil enters the world with self-consciousness. "
"The problem of evil remained unsolved even by the divinely acceptable sacrifices of Abel. "
"And with that, Cain encounters Satan in the wilderness, for all intents and purposes, and falls prey to his temptations. "
"After Auschwitz, said Theodor Adorno, student of authoritarianism, there should be no poetry. He was wrong. But the poetry should be about Auschwitz. "
"It must be him who offers to the Savior of Mankind, under the most trying of conditions, what all men most ardently desire. "
"If we all chose instead of expedience to dine on the Word of God. That would require each and every person to live, and produce, and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the privation of hunger a thing of the past. "
"Do not put the Lord your God to the test. "
"There is a powerful call to proper Being in the story of the third temptation. "
"The development of such doctrine prevented king, aristocrat and wealthy merchant alike from lording it morally over the commoner. In consequence, the metaphysical conception of the implicit transcendent worth of each and every soul established itself against impossible odds as the fundamental presupposition of Western law and society. "
"We fail to understand how difficult such an idea is to grasp. We forget that the opposite was self-evident throughout most of human history. "
"The fact that automobiles pollute only becomes a problem of sufficient magnitude to attract public attention when the far worse problems that the internal combustion engine solves has vanished from view. "
"The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them; and the impudent garrulous talk about the ‘justification by faith’ and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded. "
"The Inquisitor tells Christ that he is no longer needed. His return is simply too great a threat to the Church. "
"The Russian writer’s Inquisitor is the genuine article, in every sense. He is an opportunistic, cynical, manipulative and cruel interrogator, willing to persecute heretics—even to torture and kill them. "
"What has emerged from behind its corpse, however—and this is an issue of central importance—is something even more dead; something that was never alive, even in the past: nihilism, as well as an equally dangerous susceptibility to new, totalizing, utopian ideas. "
"The self is the great actor of evil who strode about the stage of Being as Nazi and Stalinist alike; who produced Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the multiplicity of the Soviet gulags. And all of that must be considered with dread seriousness. "
"An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure. An idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. "
"Just exactly what happened in the twentieth century, anyway. How was it that so many tens of millions had to die, sacrificed to the new dogmas and ideologies. "
"The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. "
"The alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. "
"If you decide that you are not justified in your resentment of Being, despite its inequity and pain, you may come to notice things you could fix to reduce even by a bit some unnecessary pain and suffering. You may come to ask yourself, What should I do today. "
"What is expedient works only for the moment. It's immediate, impulsive and limited. What is meaningful, by contrast, is the organization of what would otherwise merely be expedient into a symphony of Being. "
"We can only take eight people in our group, would have fallen into the first category, as would have, We are just leaving the hospital now. "
"I listened carefully and spoke truthfully to my client. Now and then, he would describe blood-curdling fantasies of flaying people for revenge. I would watch how I was reacting. "
"My client was very attuned to such things. He was obsessed with honour. It was more important to him than safety, freedom or belonging. "
"Still, every month or so, he would disappear on a days-long bender. He was one of those men who have a miraculous capacity for alcohol; he could drink fifty or sixty beer in a two-day binge and remain standing the whole time. "
"It would not be good for him if I provided him with more money. "
"to become possessed by some ill-formed desire, and then to craft speech and action in a manner that appears likely, rationally, to bring about that end. "
"What did her life mean, if that initial goal was wrong. "
"When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information. "
"It's not vision. It is instead willful blindness. It's the worst sort of lie. It's subtle. It avails itself of easy rationalizations. Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known. It's refusal to admit that the knocking sound means someone at the door. "
"When the individual lies, he knows it. He may blind himself to the consequences of his actions. He may fail to analyze and articulate his past, so that he does not understand. He may even forget that he lied and so be unconscious of that fact. "
"The inability of a son to thrive independently is exploited by a mother bent on shielding her child from all disappointment and pain. She never leaves, and he is never lonely. It’s an evil conspiracy, forged slowly, as the pathology unfolds, by thousands of knowing winks and nods. "
"And Satan said to him, All this power will I give you, and the glory of them; for that is what you desire. And Jesus said to him, You shall have all power, and the glory, for you are God’s son. "
"The totalitarian says, in essence, You must rely on faith in what you already know. But that is not what saves. What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know. That is faith in the possibility of human transformation. "
"That's where we put sinful Englishmen. "
"It is deceit that makes people miserable beyond what they can bear. It is deceit that fills human souls with resentment and vengefulness. It is deceit that produces the terrible suffering of mankind: the death camps of the Nazis; the torture chambers and genocides of Stalin and that even greater monster, Mao. "
"It is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. "
"Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. "
"If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. "
"You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth, or live in deceit, face the consequences, and draw your conclusions. "
"The success of a good example can always be attributed to luck. "
"The reason is simple. Things fall apart. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work today. We have inherited the great machinery of state and culture from our forefathers, but they are dead, and cannot deal with the changes of the day. The living can. "
"The truth springs forth ever anew from the most profound wellsprings of Being. It will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. "
"When you're involved in a genuine conversation, you're listening, and talking—but mostly listening. "
"It is impossible to understand how much someone has to be no one at all to exist in a world where a file folder box containing fifty indexed pages listing dreams and novels constitutes a CV. "
"The past appears fixed, but it’s not—not in an important psychological sense. "
"You don't form a comprehensive, objective record. You can't. You just don't know enough. "
"Memory is a tool. Memory is the past's guide to the future. "
"People need to think. Otherwise they wander blindly into pits. "
"True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world. "
"If you're going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons. "
"It can be worthwhile for my clients to see my reactions. To protect them from the undue influence that might produce, I attempt to set my aim properly, so that my responses emerge from the appropriate motivation. "
"You have to get along with other people. A therapist is one of those other people. A good therapist will tell you the truth about what he thinks. (That is not the same thing as telling you that what he thinks is the truth. ) Then at least you have the honest opinion of at least one person. "
"The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. "
"When someone opposes you, it is very tempting to oversimplify, parody, or distort his or her position. "
"almost all discussions involving politics or economics unfold in this manner, with each participant attempting to justify fixed, a priori positions instead of trying to learn something or to adopt a different frame (even for the novelty). "
"It takes a village to organize a mind. "
"A good lecturer is not only delivering facts (which is perhaps the least important part of a lecture), but also telling stories about those facts, pitching them precisely to the level of the audience’s comprehension, gauging that by the interest they are showing. "
"It's not clear what percentage of the world's population would find that response amusing. "
"It requires true reciprocity on the part of those listening and speaking. It allows all participants to express and organize their thoughts. "
"It's as if you are listening to yourself during such a conversation, just as you are listening to the other person. You are describing how you are responding to the new information imparted by the speaker. "
"Most of its capacity resides beyond its hard shell. "
"So much of what they are resides outside their boundaries that the screened devices we hold on our laps can only maintain their computer-like façade for a few short years. "
"We see the faces of the people we are talking to, because we need to communicate with those people and cooperate with them. We don’t see their microcosmic substructures, their cells, or the subcellular organelles, molecules and atoms that make up those cells. "
"We can literally feel things with the end of the screwdriver. When we extend a hand, holding the screwdriver, we automatically take the length of the latter into account. We can probe nooks and crannies with its extended end, and comprehend what we are exploring. "
"If we can become not only ourselves, but our families, teams and countries, cooperation comes easily to us, relying on the same deeply innate mechanisms that drive us (and other creatures) to protect our very bodies. "
"It is very difficult to make sense of the interconnected chaos of reality, just by looking at it. It’s a very complicated act, requiring, perhaps, half our brains. "
"In a crisis, when our thing no longer goes, we turn to those whose expertise far transcends ours to restore the match between our expectant desire and what actually happens. "
"When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. "
"What does all this mean. "
"Where is she. In the underworld, with all its terrors. "
"There is a dragon, Mom. It's just a little bit bigger than a house cat, and it's friendly. It's been eating all of Billy's pancakes, but soon it'll be gone and everything will be okay. "
"Do you really want the same petty annoyance tormenting you every single day of your marriage, for the decades of its existence. "
"Maybe a forthright conversation about sexual dissatisfaction might have been the proverbial stitch in time—not that it would be easy. Perhaps madame desired the death of intimacy, clandestinely, because she was deeply and secretly ambivalent about sex. God knows there’s reason to be. "
"What can possibly compare to the pleasures of sophisticated and well-practised martyrdom. 'She's such a saint, and married to such a terrible man. She deserved much better. "
"It is better under such conditions to live in willful blindness and enjoy the bliss of ignorance. "
"Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution. "
"What if she who has been betrayed, now driven by desperation, is now determined to face all the incoherence of past, present and future. What if she decided to sort through the mess, even though she has avoided doing so until now, and is all the weaker and more confused for it. "
"When error announces itself, undifferentiated chaos is at hand. Its reptilian form paralyzes and confuses. "
"Precision specifies. When something terrible happens, it is precision that separates the unique terrible thing that has actually happened from all the other, equally terrible things that might have happened—but did not. "
"Courageous and truthful words will render your reality simple, pristine, well-defined and habitable. "
"The crazy kids, almost always boys, would pull back about fifteen yards from the top of the steps. Then they would place a foot on their boards, and skate like mad to get up some speed. "
"We feel invigorated and excited when we work to optimize our future performance, while playing in the present. Otherwise we lumber around, sloth-like, unconscious, unformed and careless. "
"If you read the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung, for example, as well as their precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche—you learn that there is a dark side to everything. "
"When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person's motives are genuine. "
"When my friend Chris got into it with Native kids, he wouldn't fight back. He didn't feel that his self-defence was morally justified, so he took his beatings. "
"When I was an undergraduate, Chris was, for a while, one of my roommates. One late night we went to a local bar. We walked home, afterward. He started to snap the side-view mirrors off parked cars, one after the other. "
"Something wasn't right. It was in the air. At four in the morning, I had had enough. I crawled out of bed. I knocked quietly on Chris's door and went without waiting for an answer into his room. "
"I felt that such a decision was properly considered—but only in his particular case (where less than one might have been even better). "
"We do what we can to make the best of things, in our vulnerability and fragility, and the planet is harder on us than we are on it. "
"The boys who shot up Columbine High School, whom we discussed earlier, had appointed themselves judges of the human race—like the TEDx professor, although much more extreme; like Chris, my doomed friend. "
"The situation in the universities (and in educational institutions in general) is far more problematic than the basic statistics indicate. "
"The number of young men who said the same thing declined 15 percent over the same period (from 35 to 29 percentfn3). "
"The oppressive patriarchal institution of marriage has now become a luxury. "
"There are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men. "
"Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other. "
"I can't see how this behaviour would have improved his popularity or status. Now his low-cost and locally made napkins are distributed across India, manufactured by women-run self-help groups. "
"Now it’s four out of five, with the remainder relying on pads, which are now hyper-absorbent, and held in place by effective adhesives (opposed to the awkwardly placed, bulky, belted, diaper-like sanitary napkins of the 1970s). "
"The world entered a prolonged and extremely dangerous cold war. "
"We will make soap out of the kulak, claimed one particularly brutal cadre of city-dwellers, mobilized by party and Soviet executive committees, and sent out into the countryside. "
"To eat your own children is a barbarian act, declared posters of the Soviet regime. "
"There are 'women' only because men gain by excluding them. There are 'males and females' only because members of that more heterogeneous group benefit by excluding the tiny minority of people whose biological sexuality is amorphous. "
"But (and this is where you separate the metaphorical boys from the men, philosophically) the fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role. "
"I think, as well (on what might be considered the leftish side), that the incremental remake of university administrations into analogues of private corporations is a mistake. "
"The state supporting one-sided radicalism, it is also supporting indoctrination. "
"Since all outcome inequalities must be eliminated (inequality being the heart of all evil), then all gender differences must be regarded as socially constructed. "
"Group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual. "
"If men and women act, voluntarily, to produce gender-unequal outcomes, those very choices must have been determined by cultural bias. "
"It is not the case that aggression is merely learned. Aggression is there at the beginning. There are ancient biological circuits, so to speak, that underlie defensive and predatory aggression. "
"Because too-agreeable people bend over backwards for other people, they do not stand up properly for themselves. "
"The Oedipal mother makes a pact with herself, her children, and the devil himself. The deal is this: 'Above all, never leave me. In return, I will do everything for you. "
"The choicest cut of child is the spirit, and it's always consumed first. "
"The patriarchy rules, and each woman belongs exclusively to one man. "
"The Prince could be a lover, but could also be a woman’s own attentive wakefulness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence. "
"When Ariel fails to form a union with Prince Eric, Ursula steals her soul, and places it in her large collection of shrivelled and warped semi-beings, well-protected by her feminine graces. "
"Sometimes that made her resentful—something she also feels, sometimes, in relationship to my father, who is strongly inclined to do what he wants, when he wants to. "
"When a new guy first showed up, the other workers would inevitably provide him with an insulting nickname. They called me Howdy-Doody, after I was accepted as a crew member (something I am still slightly embarrassed to admit). "
"The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent and reliable. "
"A woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child. "
"When softness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues, then hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination. "
"No one truly on the side of humanity would ally him or herself with such a thing. No one aiming at moving up would allow him or herself to become possessed by such a thing. "
"I am going to start this chapter by stating directly that I own a dog, an American Eskimo, one of the many variants of the basic spitz type. They were known as German spitzes until the First World War made it verboten to admit that anything good could come from Germany. "
"Since I also like dogs, there is no reason for me to suffer such a fate. So, if you like to pet dogs when you meet them on the street, don't feel obliged to hate me. "
"It is frequently sufficient to cause genuine trauma. "
"It's not God I don't accept. Understand this,, says Ivan. I do not accept the world that He created, this world of God's, and cannot agree with it. "
"What can be truly loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations. "
"Some of your femur appears to be dead. You don't need a hip replacement when you're thirty. You need one now. "
"Eventually, more than two dozen variants emerged. Green kryptonite weakened Superman. In sufficient dosage, it could even kill him. Red caused him to behave strangely. Red-green caused him to mutate (he once grew a third eye in the back of his head). "
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. And that became Superman’s problem: he developed powers so extreme that he could deus himself out of anything, at any time. "
"People who come to the former conclusion are flirting with suicide, and those who come to the latter with something worse, something truly monstrous. They're consorting with the idea of the destruction of everything. "
"When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick. "
"The appalling rehab centre. That produced post-traumatic stress symptoms. "
"When you meet a cat on a street, many things can happen. If I see a cat at a distance, for example, the evil part of me wants to startle it with a loud pfft! sound—front teeth over bottom lip. "
"Things are good. For now. "
Comments
Post a Comment