Moses Tabion > Moses's Quotes

“It makes perfect sense that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households; if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place, then they will grow up with a healthy relationship toward themselves and other people. - able to give love freely and receive it in return. Conversely, if a person is severely mistreated from his earliest years, subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse, he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“From what I've witness, honesty didn't really make anyone happy. The truth was a punch to the gut, and while you were falling, a knee to the face, then you could lie on the floor and bleed for a spell.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade

“Somehow, he created an environment that was both demanding and incredibly fun. He suppressed a smile at our silliness—just letting the corner of his mouth turn up slightly so we could see his amusement—and told us bluntly when our work wasn’t good enough. We loved him. But we also feared him, in a healthy way. Because he made us feel important, because he so obviously cared about what he was doing and about us, we desperately wanted to please him.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger, a place where the land and its weather—probably the most violent and extreme on earth—demand only one thing: humility.”
― Timothy Egan

“Men are attracted by spirit. By power men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power anxieties are created.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Space flight participants, commonly known as space tourists, pay between $20 and $40 million each to leave Earth for 10 days or so and go to the International Space Station (ISS) via Soyuz, the compact Russian rocket that is now the only way for humans to get to the ISS.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“He filled his stomach three times a day with the roasted meat that he and Park had fantasized about in Camp 14. He bathed with soap and hot water. He got rid of the lice he had lived with since birth.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“In comparing Belle to Jack the Ripper as a murderer driven by bloodlust and employing a signature MO, this anonymous expert accurately identified her as the type of homicidal maniac for which no name had yet been coined: what a later age would call a serial killer.”
― Harold Schechter, Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

“What I do know is what Patrice taught me: There is meaning and purpose in not surrendering in the face of loss, but instead working to bind up wounds, ease pain, and spare others what you have seen.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Years ago, Re had raged against humans for violating Ma’at, so he had sent Hathor to destroy mankind. She transformed into the lion goddess Sekhmet and Egypt’s fields ran red with the blood of her rampage. Seeing this, Re realized his mistake and ordered Sekhmet to stop, but she was too gone with bloodlust to listen. Knowing he had to halt her some other way, Re stained seven thousand jugs of beer with pomegranate juice and poured the red liquid into her path. Believing the beer to be blood, Sekhmet gorged herself and passed out in a drunken stupor. When she awoke, her bloodlust had passed and she returned to being Hathor. Thus the goddesses of love and violence shared a common history.”
― Stephanie Thornton, Daughter of the Gods: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

“Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long , grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion!”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his personality”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Donald Trump, even more than his father, was perceived as a vulgarian—after all, he put his name on his buildings, quite a déclassé thing to do.”
― Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

“Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas.”
― Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Usu­al­ly, very ear­ly in the morn­ing. Ger­man la­bor­ers were go­ing to work. They would stop and look at us with­out sur­prise. One day when we had come to a stop, a work­er took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it in­to a wag­on. There was a stam­pede. Dozens of starv­ing men fought des­per­ate­ly over a few crumbs. The work­er watched the spec­ta­cle with great interest. Years later, I witnessed a sim­ilar spec­ta­cle in Aden. Our ship’s pas­sen­gers amused them­selves by throw­ing coins to the “natives,” who dove to retrieve them. An el­egant Parisian la­dy took great plea­sure in this game. When I no­ticed two chil­dren des­perate­ly fighting in the wa­ter, one try­ing to stran­gle the oth­er, I implored the la­dy: “Please, don’t throw any more coins!” “Why not?” said she. “I like to give char­ity…”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Szabo reckoned that the future of libraries was a combination of a people’s university, a community hub, and an information base, happily partnered with the Internet rather than in competition with it. In practical terms, Szabo felt the library should begin offering classes and voter registration and literacy programs and story times and speaker series and homeless outreach and business services and computer access and movie rentals and e-book loans and a nice gift shop. Also, books.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Far better to dare mighty things and fail mightily than to never dare at all.”
― Stephanie Thornton, The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora

“I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the next chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, “In all history, there is no known case of anyone’s creating a problem for anyone else.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“For all the talk about the need to be a likable "team player," many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are the qualities of subordinates -- of servants rather than masters, women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engendered by frequent job loss and to achieve a perpetually sunny outlook, management guru Harvey Mackay notes cryptically that "the nicest, most loyal, and most submissive employees are often the easiest people to fire." Given the turmoil in the corporate world, the prescriptions of niceness ring of lambs-to-the-slaughter.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“In a dog’s life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us. We could have bought a small yacht with what we spent on our dog and all the things he destroyed. Then again, how many yachts wait by the door all day for your return? How many live for the moment they can climb in your lap or ride down the hill with you on a toboggan, licking your face?”
― John Grogan, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog

“I have a two-headed bear that I never named. It was a gift from an ex-boyfriend. It was a pretty perfect gift. Soft and disturbing, which is how I would describe myself. I still have it.”
― Amy Schumer, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

“He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!”
― Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

“good leadership means leading the way, not hectoring other people to do things your way. Bullying, bickering and competing for dominance are, event in a low-risk situation, excellent ways to destroy morale and diminish productivity.”
― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

“We were left with nothing because of a love like acid that ate its way through our entire family.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“magnanimous”
― Kenneth Hoss, Storm Warning

“...just because you love someone doesn't mean you know them”
― D.J. Palmer, The New Husband