Eldon Sortland > Eldon's Quotes

“Mike says the studio indulges Leo bc he's a magical starboy. He thinks Melanie puts up w/it bc it's a great credit bc everything Leo touches turns to gold. Maybe one day I'll turn to gold.”
― Nicole Schubert, Saoirse Berger's Bookish Lens In La La Land

“I don’t have an impressive life master plan. I often don’t know where I’m going fifteen minutes from now. I just try to understand right from wrong, and to follow what my mother, pastors, and coaches taught me.”
― John M. Vermillion, Pack's Posse

“Growth happens in many ways, but a primary way is by giving your team authority equal to their responsibilities. This allows them to learn how to win by giving them the right to lose and, as a result, to learn from the experience”
― Andrew Wyatt, Pro Leadership: Establishing Your Credibility, Building Your Following and Leading With Impact

“The only thing worse than fighting in a war, is fighting in a war within a war.”
― Michael Zboray, Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969

“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).  Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell.  In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother.  This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history.  A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers.  For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations.  This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional.   There”
― Alexander Drake, The Invention of Christianity

“Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”
― Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3

“The truth is not arrived at by majority vote.”
― Ken Follett, Fall of Giants

“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we have forgotten him.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“He thought if I never have anything else I will always have dawn and morning sunlight.”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“The whole problem is wealth redistribution. How can we create equal opportunities for people around the globe? Seems impossible in short term, but it is the ultimate goal of the future.”
― Zoltan Andrejkovics, Together: AI and Human. On The Same Side.

“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”
― Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

“a counselor interrupted his meeting with faculty down the hall. "Frank, they need you," he said. "You need to go out there."
Frank walked the hallway to the nave of the church, contemplating what to say. And again he faced the dilemma of how to act at the microphone. Several of his friends, and staff, too, had warned him not to cry again. "God, you're going to be in the national media," they said. "You can't show that, it's a sign of weakness." He had gotten away with it once, but the media would crucify him if they discovered he was buckling.
The trauma specialists disagreed. These kids had been raised in a western mentality, they argued: real men fend for themselves; tears are for weaklings; therapy is a joke. "Frank, you are the key," one counselor advised him. "You're an emotional person, you need to show those emotions. If you try to hold your emotions inside, you're going to set the image for other people." The boys, in particular, would be watching him. DeAngelis felt. They were already dangerously bottled up. "Frank, they need to know it's all right to show emotion," the counselor said. "Give them that permission."...
"I walked on that stage and I saw those kids cheering and the tears started coming down."
This time he decided to address the tears. "Guys, trust me, now is not the time to show your manliness," he told them. "Emotion is emotion, and keeping it inside doesn't mean you're strong."
That was the last time Mr. D worried about crying in public. p117-18”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Why in the world would someone say, 'I can't afford it' or 'I can't do it' to something they want? Why would someone deny themselves the things they want? It makes no logical sense.”
― Robert T. Kiyosaki, Retire Young Retire Rich: How to Get Rich Quickly and Stay Rich Forever!

“He stepped on the unexploded artillery shell, and it tore him apart.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.”
― Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“فجأة ما عاد يرى نفسه, أي أنه ما عاد يرى نفسه كجزء من العالم الذي يحيط به. لقد تملكه شعور ليضع ثوان كما لو أنه بعيد جداً في الخارج, كما لو أنه يتأمل العالم بمنظار مقلوب.”
― Patrick Süskind, The Pigeon