Yas > Yas's Quotes

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we’re eating animals.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer. ”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring- to the carelessness of both consumers and producers.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

“Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s hard to tell the truth without them.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“Probability doesn’t make mistakes; people using probability make mistakes.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“The result of this deeply male-dominated culture is that the male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal, while the female experience--that of half the global population, after all--is seen as, well, niche.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose. The world of work needs a wholesale redesign--of its regulations, of its equipment, of its culture--and this redesign must be led by data on female bodies and female lives. We have to start recognising that the work women do is not an added extra, a bonus that we could do without: women's work, paid and unpaid, is the backbone of our society and our economy. It's about time we started valuing it.”
― Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“A 2013 UN homicide survey found that 96% 9 of homicide perpetrators worldwide are male. So is it humans who are murderous,or men?”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

“Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, 'tall' and 'short' would come to have just as precise a meaning as 'bird' or 'mammal'. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to 'put down' a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might 'put down' a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“In the case of living machinery, the ‘designer’ is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“If you don't understand how something
works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don't
know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don't understand
how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis
a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don't go
to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion