David Esposito > David's Quotes

“In fact, the more you learn about the nature of defiance in children, the less you’ll view it as “something wrong with your child” and the more you’ll see it as a difficult situation or pattern of interactions with highly workable solutions. I trust you’ll finish this chapter with new hope that you can meet this challenge and restore the loving relationship with your child that you both deserve, and that this problem does not have to stand in the way of your child’s achieving a happy, healthy adulthood.”
― Russell A. Barkley, Your Defiant Child: 8 Steps to Better Behavior

“Over time both parents and child figure out that the more quickly they get enraged and threatening, the more quickly they get what they want—the parents get obedience or the child gets a reprieve from a command. When this process goes unchecked over many months, it can lead to confrontations that end in parents physically abusing their children or the children destroying property, attacking the parents, holding their breath until blue, banging their head against a floor or wall, or hurting themselves in other ways. This is how “No!” escalates into violence in some families.”
― Russell A. Barkley, Your Defiant Child: 8 Steps to Better Behavior

“The children who need love the most will always ask for it in the most unloving ways”
― Russel Barkley

“A complete history of sexual scandal in Washington will probably never be written, because the public does not want to read a 20,000 page book that needs to be updated weekly (note to self: maybe they DO -- idea for next book). From the earliest days of the Republic, when our first Ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, fondled and groped the awestruck wives of his French hosts while on mission to Paris, shortly to be succeeded by the even-more-amorous Thomas Jefferson, who broke an ankle in the Louvre while leaping to an assignation with yet another married Frenchwoman, all the way down to our contemporary satyrs, the priapic Kennedys, Wilbur "Fanne Fox" Mills, "Slobbering Bob" Packwood, Bill "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" Clinton, etc., our political leaders have repeatedly proven to be incredibly horny old goats.”
― Guillermo Jimenez, Red Genes, Blue Genes: Exposing Political Irrationality

“If you defer investing your time and energy until you see that you need to, chances are it will already be too late.”
― Clayton M. Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Change the language in the tribe, and you have changed the tribe itself.”
― Dave Logan, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

“you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.”
― Robert Penn Warren

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The conventional wisdom is often wrong.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“If you both own a gun and a swimming pool in your backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”
― levitt, steven, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of "identity". It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share—her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren’t aligned after all.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“An expert must be BOLD if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into
conventional wisdom.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Congress passed legislation requiring a five-year mandatory sentence for selling just five grams of crack; you would have to sell 500 grams of powder cocaine to get an equivalent sentence. This disparity has often been called racist, since it disproportionately imprisons blacks.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Despite spending more time with themselves than with any other person, people often have surprisingly poor insight into their skills and abilities.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“A woman's income appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off.”
― Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Since the science of economics is primarily a set of tools, as opposed to a subject matter, then no subject, however offbeat, need be beyond its reach.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“When moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“An expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn't get much attention.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Unless you have more information, however, it’s hard to say what’s causing what.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything