Quote collection
304 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them."
"I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms."
"Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent."
"You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world."
"If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money."
"If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes."
"The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence."
"If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?"
"When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex."
"The Law of the Few... says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger."
"If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too."
"Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community."
"...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think."
"extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress."
"You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?"
"The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done."
"Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome."
"understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled."
"In a country that never wins anything: in Canada, if one of our athletes so much as makes the final in a World Championship, we declare a national holiday."
"Those with health insurance are overinsured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured."