Patrik > Patrik's Quotes

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

“It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee," Wallander said.
"No work would be possible without coffee."
They pondered the importance of coffee in silence.”
― Henning Mankell, One Step Behind

“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Allan had always reasoned about religion that if you couldn't know for sure then there was no point in going around guessing.”
― Jonas Jonasson, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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

“And knowing what happens on average is a good place to start. By so doing, we insulate ourselves from the tendency to build our thinking - our daily decisions, our laws, our governance - on exceptions and anomalies rather than on reality.”
― Steven D. Levitt, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.”
― George Carlin

“When economists base their models on their fantasies of an "economic man" motivated only by self-interest, they forget community--the all-important web of meaning we spin around each other--the inescapable context within which anything truly human has taken place.”
― Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.”
― Adam Smith, The Money Game

“There are basically two ways to help people get sufficient money to fund their entire retirement. The first is to get people to save more money, and to start saving at a younger age. The second approach is to get people to die at a younger age. The easier approach, by far, is getting people to die younger. And how might we achieve this? By allowing citizens to smoke. By subsidizing sugary and fatty foods. By limiting access to preventive health care etc. When we think about retirement savings in these terms, it seems that we’re already doing the most we can on this front.”
― Dan Ariely, Irrationally yours : on missing socks, pick-up lines and other existential puzzles

“All thinking men are atheists.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms