Nandini

“sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“The writer C. S. Lewis once characterized this style of argument: “The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.”18 Such arguments are effectively impossible to refute, as Lewis noted. “A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved,” although it does “tell us a good deal about those who hold it.”19 The”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“A worm was thus constructed from two kinds of inputs—“intrinsic” inputs from genes, and “extrinsic” inputs from cell-cell interactions. Jokingly, Brenner called it the “British model” versus the “American model.” The British way, Brenner wrote, “is for cells to do their own thing and not to talk to their neighbors very much. Ancestry is what counts, and once a cell is born in a certain place it will stay there and develop according to rigid rules. The American way is quite the opposite. Ancestry does not count. . . . What counts is the interactions with its neighbors. It frequently exchanges information with its fellow cells and often has to move to accomplish its goals and find its proper place.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History