Kristine > Kristine's Quotes

“The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators: They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanics of influence and know when to depart from dogma.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“He dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.”
― Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

“We live in a center-right country. Now watch me smile oleaginously.”
― Jon Meacham

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive. ”
― Havelock Ellis

“Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life? ”
― Havelock Ellis

“There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.”
― Havelock Ellis

“To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also revetting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You.”
― Michael Sandel

“Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
― David Sedaris

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Science is a smorgasbord, and google will guide you to the study that's right for you.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“...human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion