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“Many people hold false beliefs not because they are in love with falsehoods, or because they are stupid—as conventional wisdom might suggest—but because those beliefs help them hold their lives together in some way.”
― Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain
― Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain
“People with depression and some other disorders often see reality more clearly.”
― Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain
― Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain
“Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?”
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
― Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It
― The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It
“No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,” he said, referencing the tribes that once flourished on the geographical boundaries of modern France. We think we are citizens of a nation because we have “forgotten many things.” Since Renan, others have tried and failed to establish a good definition of a nation. There really aren’t any objective criteria that can explain the diverse origins, functions and commonalities of different nations. Perhaps the most accurate definition of a nation was put forward by the political scientist Benedict Anderson. His conclusion was that we believe ourselves to be Greek or Syrian or Nigerian simply because we believe ourselves to be Greek or Syrian or Nigerian. A nation, he wrote, is a social construction—an “imagined community.”
― Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain
― Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain
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