Elien > Elien's Quotes

“In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again.”
― Rowling, J.K.

“They always scream when the eyeballs fall out.”
― Neil Gaiman

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“I'm about as useful as a fingerless eunuch during Fuck Fest February! someone give me a gun!”
― Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 27: The Whisperer War

“The things we love destroy us every time.”
― G.R.R. Martin

“I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Break hearts, not promises.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Once I start thinking about splitting the skin apart, I literally cannot not do it. I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“Stel alleen vragen die je kunt beantwoorden en probeer je publiek objectief te informeren, te amuseren, te verbazen, te bedroeven. Want veel journalistiek hangt inderdaad aan elkaar van clichés, manipulatie en luiheid, dus zo onderscheid je jezelf al. En heb je geluk, dan verander je soms iets of breng je een stellige overtuiging aan het wankelen.”
― Coen van Zwol

“The Japanese approach to life is that you work every day towards perfection, knowing you will never reach it, but always moving closer. To me, that is skat[eboard]ing. It’s art, abstract expressionism on concrete.”
― Mark Hoppus, Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir

“Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs has all been comprehensively distorted by modernity.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“It is disquieting to learn that vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.VIII Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease. The current US president, Donald Trump—also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night—may want to take note.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity. Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep. Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

“Altogether, 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. All that was required for such catastrophic fallout was the escape of less than 5 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Originally it had contained more than 250 pounds of enriched uranium—enough to pollute and devastate most of Europe. And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet.”
― Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

“The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more. It must learn its lessons from what happened in and around Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.”
― Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

“With beautiful statistics like these, how can anyone say the world is getting worse? The Negativity Instinct In large part, it is because of our negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. There are three things going on here: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Today, Muslim women have on average 3.1 children. Christian women have 2.7. There is no major difference between the birth rates of the great world religions.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“Data was absolutely key. And because it will be key in the future too, when there is another outbreak somewhere, it is crucial to protect its credibility and the credibility of those who produce it. Data must be used to tell the truth, not to call to action, no matter how noble the intentions.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“LYING”
― brian k vaughn

“Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapses of white supremacy and colonialism.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Many people (especially academics) remain unaware of the depth of this problem, which presents as ideological closedness, unwillingness to accept any disagreement, and an authoritarian will to enforce a Social Justice conception of society and moral imperative on others.35”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“If we train young people to read insult, hostility, and prejudice into every interaction, they may increasingly see the world as hostile to them and fail to thrive in it.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“There is a problem that begins in our universities, and it comes down to Social Justice. The most immediate aspect of the problem is that Social Justice scholarship gets passed down to students, who then go out into the world. This effect is strongest within Social Justice fields, which teach students to be skeptical of science, reason, and evidence; to regard knowledge as tied to identity; to read oppressive power dynamics into every interaction; to politicize every facet of life; and to apply ethical principles unevenly, in accordance with identity.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“As an applied postmodern Theory, postcolonial Theory is of considerable real-world concern and poses threats to society that the original postmodernism did not. The drives to decolonize everything from hair to English literature curricula, to tear down paintings and smash statues, and to erase history while opening up revisionist discussions of it, are particularly alarming.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody