Janis Lanka > Janis's Quotes

“They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce...

I concluded that if I could only nudge the world a little bit, maybe that would be enough.

But nudging isn't enough.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“Today, poor people the world over are seeking opportunity and choice to have greater dignity in their lives - and they want to do it themselves, even if they need a little help. Today we have the tools and technologies to bring real opportunities to people all across the world.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“While we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong.”
― Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance: An Investigation

“We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.”
― Warren Buffett

“The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was blazed in earlier times by well-meaning Freudians and Marxists - and I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I'm thinking of the earliest incarnations of Marxism, for instance, before
Stalinism and Maoism killed millions.

Movements associated with Freud and Marx both claimed foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Both perceived themselves to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.

The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on - portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud's calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“In fact, Kelly evolved his own unorthodox security methods, which worked beautifully in the early days of the 1950s. We never stamped a security classification on any paperwork. That way, nobody was curious to read it. We just made damned sure that all sensitive papers stayed inside the Skunk Works.”
― Ben Rich CEO Lockheed Skunk Works

“It is true that we still talk about "happiness" or "liberty" or "justice," but people no longer have any idea of the content of the phrases, nor of the conditions they require, and these empty phrases are only used in order to take measures which have no relation to these illusions.”
― Jacques Ellul, Presence of the Kingdom

“Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.”
― Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

“When you visit a Danish company and can't tell the CEO from the office clerk, that's Viking egalitarianism at work.”
― Michael Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

“We got to the moon and built the pyramids without email and Facebook.”
― Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

“Without a plan, we do what’s passive and easy—not what is really fulfilling. Robert Epstein surveyed thirty thousand”
― Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Our ability to engage in passionate, unfiltered debate about what we need to do to succeed will determine our future as much as any products we develop or partnerships we sign.” It”
― Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“It is not hard to make money in the market. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges. It is an obvious lesson, but one frequently ignored.”
― Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street

“Forecasts are difficult to make—particularly those about the future.”
― Burton G. Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing

“The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron. Economic theory has been much preoccupied with this rational fool.”
― Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics

“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that’s something only humans can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead. Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“To further complicate the matter, we are altering the dynamic with pathogens simply through our encounters with them. By venturing into the microbes’ homes deep in rain forests, for logging, planting, and hunting for bushmeat; by concentrating large numbers of people together; by breeding millions and millions of pigs and poultry and keeping them in close confines; by overusing and misusing antimicrobial drugs, we humans are forcing microbes to adapt to continual stresses and giving them opportunities nature never did.”
― Michael T. Osterholm, Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. It’s connection.”
― Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

“My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player Two

“If you give employees more freedom instead of developing processes to prevent them from exercising their own judgment, they will make better decisions and it’s easier to hold them accountable.”
― Reed Hastings, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention