Mary Mcclain

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Will Storr
“Haven’t we all done this? Hardened a particular position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger?”
Will Storr, The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

Will Storr
“Unpredictable humans. This is the stuff of story.”
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

Will Storr
“The Ancient Greeks had this idea that being physically beautiful was the same as being ethically good and, likewise, being physically ugly was the same as being ethically bad.’ They had a word for this: kalokagathia, which came from kalos, meaning beautiful, kai, meaning ‘and’, and agathos, meaning ‘good’. ‘This idea, that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is very much still with us,’ he said. The scholar Professor Werner Jaeger has written of kalokagathia’s roots in early Greek aristocracy, describing it as their ‘ideal of human perfection, an ideal towards which the elite of the race was constantly trained’. Just as John Pridmore’s self snatched core ideas of who he was and who he ought to be from his culture, so does mine.”
Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

“If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to meet it.”
Jonathan Winters
tags: life

Will Storr
“This is where low self-esteem gets built into the core of the machine. For Aristotle, a person had innate potential and was naturally moving towards perfection. But for the Christians, a person was born in a state of sin and falling towards hell. God, not the individual, was where perfection lay. This meant that a person wanting to become more perfect would have to engage in a constant war with themselves – a war, not with forces out in the world, but with their own soul, their conscience, their mind and thoughts. And because perfection only existed outside the human realm, that struggle would always be hopeless. The Christians had given the Western self a soul, and then begun to torture it.”
Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

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