Michael > Michael's Quotes

“In every age, there comes a time when leadership suddenly comes forth to meet the needs of the hour. And so there is no man who does not find his time, and there is no hour that does not have its leader.”
― Joan Biskupic, Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice

“People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it’s illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans’ “theory of mind” is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don’t fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that “makes us human.”
― Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Do you know why America does not understand Egypt? Because they do not understand the meaning of the word Maaleesh. In English, Maaleesh means ‘doesn’t matter,’ and it is the one word you need to understand Egypt. In America everything is now, now, now—make the money now, make the career now. But in Egypt, everybody believes in life after death, so everything in life is Maaleesh.”
― Michael J. Totten, Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa

“George Orwell once observed that if Napoléon Bonaparte had been cut down by a musket ball as he entered Moscow, he would have been remembered as the greatest general since Alexander.”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“TAKE THE ROOM-TEMPERATURE op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir.” Then spend as much time as you can afford in elucidating the subject. And then . .”
― Christopher Hitchens, And Yet ...: Essays

“Throwing is hard.1 In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone. To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the tenth story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“The two palm worms are brought in separate bowls, still alive, wriggling fiercely in a bath of turpentine-colored fish sauce with a few slivers of chili. The glossy brown heads of the grubs, the larvae of a weevil that infests palm trees, glisten like popcorn seeds; the wriggling abdomens have pale rubbery ridges. The owner of the restaurant, chubby and affable, comes out to instruct Nhat and me: we are to grasp the heads, pull off the fat white bodies with our teeth, and discard the heads, taking care that the larvae do not nip our tongues with their formidable pincers in the process. Biting down on squirming larvae seems barbaric, but my brain is starting to swim due to hunger, and the fish sauce is muskily aromatic. How bad could their fat glistening bodies taste? And am I not a direct descendant of insectivores, albeit roughly 100 million years removed? I”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today

“Considering that crickets produce 50 percent less carbon dioxide than cattle per unit of weight gain and convert feed into food twice as efficiently as chickens, four times more efficiently than pigs, and twelve times more efficiently than cattle, insects deserve to be more popular on menus.3 Since insects aren’t warm-blooded, they don’t need to consume as many calories as warm-blooded animals when putting on weight.”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today

“Oak trees can churn out roughly 500 to 1,000 pounds (225 to 450 kg) of acorns a year, albeit during a brief window of a few weeks. A Native American family living in California a few centuries ago, collecting over the span of two or three weeks, could set aside enough acorns to last two or three years. They could gather acorns from at least seven different species of oak trees, preferring oily acorns over sweet ones, and knew two methods to purge them of noxious tannins. The common technique was to de-hull the acorns, pound the acorn meat into mush and drop it into a pit, then douse the mush with water heated by hot stones until all the bitterness was leached. Alternatively, acorns could be buried in mud by streams or swamps for several months, after which they would become edible. To complement their protein-deficient acorn cuisine, Native Americans in California hunted salmon, deer, antelope, mountain sheep, and black bear and gathered earthworms, caterpillars (smoked and then boiled), grasshoppers (doused with salty water and roasted in earth pits), and bee and wasp larvae.15 The”
― Stephen Le, 100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today

“I’ll read to you,” Elizabeth said. “Any preferences?” “Evelyn Waugh.” “Really? How strange.” “That’s what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what’s being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don’t know it’s satire and just think it’s comedy.” Elizabeth considered this. “You’re probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad.” Hiroko’s”
― Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows: A Novel

“Why didn’t you stay?” she had whispered against the unyielding stone. Why didn’t you stay? She pressed the berry against her lips. Why didn’t I ask you just one more time to stay? Sajjad stood up quietly and walked over to her. “There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming ‘ghum-khaur’—grief-eaters—who take in the mourner’s sorrow.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows: A Novel

“Were it not for Augustine’s “harass, but do not destroy” formula, Christians and Jews would certainly have had much less to do with each other throughout the many centuries before exterminationist anti-Semitism entered the West’s historical consciousness and conscience. Moreover, many Westerners today see Christianity as the beginning of Western proselytizing and do not realize that Judaism itself, in its historical infancy, was a proselytizing religion using tactics, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible, that could sometimes be summed up as “harass and destroy.”
― Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

“Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)”
― Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

“I can only give them my first log, with birds, sea, daily sights and little everyday problems. My real log is written in the sea and sky; it can’t be photographed and given to others. It has gradually come to life out of all that has surrounded us for months: the sounds of water on the hull, the sounds of wind gliding on the sails, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk. 1”
― Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

“The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: “Just about every animal,” Scott says—not just mammals and birds—“can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.” Once”
― Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

“Less headway is being made in figuring out how to improve teacher quality, an undertaking more complex than simply recruiting new teachers with better academic credentials or offering higher salaries. In high-achieving countries, such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, teachers come from the top of their high school graduating classes, teaching schools have a high bar for acceptance, and teachers’ salaries are competitive with those of lawyers and scientists. It is generally the opposite in the United States.”
― Edward Alden, How America Stacks Up: Economic Competitiveness and U.S. Policy

“The emperor Caesar Augustus had a parakeet who greeted him daily, and after his victory over Mark Antony in Egypt in 29 B.C., he purchased a raven whose trainer had taught him to say “Ave, Caesar Victor Imperator.” (The trainer had wisely taught another bird to say “Ave, Victor Imperator Antoni” in case the battle went the other way.)”
― Sy Montgomery, Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur

“Stay clear of anyone—other than a clergyman—who refers to God more than once in an hour One sees a growing number of professional moralists who appear on TV telling people what God wants of them. If these folks are right about God, it is splendid news, and one should follow them as if they were Moses. If, however, they have misinterpreted God's wishes—about political candidates, free expression, human reproduction, and other issues on which He is said to be communicating His opinions to a select few—or if these professional moralists have mistaken God's voice for, say, Elvis's, then paying attention to them may only lead to divine trouble. Better to play it safe and avoid such people. The danger in hanging around them is that God may be tired of listening to them misrepresent Him and decide to revert to His old bad-tempered tricks with locusts and floods. Of course, this being the 21st century, He may have refined His arsenal so that He can pick off only the offenders and leave the rest of us unharmed. But I would not count on this. God is good, but He may not be that good. ***”
― Roger Rosenblatt, Rules For Aging: A Wry and Witty Guide to Life

“E=mc2 is even better than the best poetry: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”
― David Bodanis, E=mc²

“More elaborate toolkits are known for chimpanzees in Gabon hunting for honey. In yet another dangerous activity, these chimps raid bee nests using a five-piece toolkit, which includes a pounder (a heavy stick to break open the hive’s entrance), a perforator (a stick to perforate the ground to get to the honey chamber), an enlarger (to enlarge an opening through sideways action), a collector (a stick with a frayed end to dip into honey and slurp it off), and swabs (strips of bark to scoop up honey).21 This tool use is complicated since the tools are prepared and carried to the hive before most of the work begins, and they will need to be kept nearby until the chimp is forced to quit due to aggressive bees. Their use takes foresight and planning of sequential steps, exactly the sort of organization of activities often emphasized for our human ancestors. At one level chimpanzee tool use may seem primitive, as it is based on sticks and stones, but on another level it is extremely advanced.22 Sticks and stones are all they have in the forest, and we should keep in mind that also for the Bushmen the most ubiquitous instrument is the digging stick (a sharpened stick to break open anthills and dig up roots). The tool use of wild chimpanzees by far exceeds what was ever held possible. Chimpanzees use between fifteen”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Treating a mindless gadget as mindful can sometimes look a bit silly, but neglecting the mind of a sentient human or a potentially sentient animal is the essential ingredient for inhumanity.”
― Nicholas Epley, Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want

“Trump’s rash and retaliatory dismissal of Maguire would compel retired Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to write: “As Americans, we should be frightened—deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security—then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”
― Carol Leonnig, I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

“Ultralights are airplanes intended for recreational use, and limited in gross weight to 254 pounds and in speed to 55 knots. A taxonomist studying their ancestry would probably conclude that they are descendants not of airplanes but of hang gliders;”
― Peter Garrison, Why?: Thinking About Plane Crashes

“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”
― Garrison Keillor

“A book is a gift you can open again and again.”
― Garrison Keillor

“Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.”
― Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home

“I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. ”
― Garrison Keillor

“When in doubt, look intelligent.”
― Garrison Keillor