Collected wisdom in the form of pithy quotes. Mostly written by others.
“If you are struggling to figure out where you are headed in life or what your are passionate about, pay attention to the activities, ideas, and areas where you love the process, not just the outcome… true fulfillment comes from the love of process.”
Amelia Boone from Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. (see also Amelia Boone on Beating 99% of Men and Suffering for High Performance (#127) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss)
...one must never accept man-made evils (there are no others) in silent resignation, one must never submit to them voluntarily—and even if one is imprisoned in some ghastly dictatorship’s jail, where no action is possible, serenity comes from the knowledge that one does not accept it.
Ayn Rand from the essay "The Metaphysical vs. The Man-Made" - Philosophy: Who Needs It (Kindle Edition)
Maxwell QuotePic
"...it's easier to go from failure to success than from excuses to success."
I believe that the narratives we tell ourselves, about ourselves and about others, are crucial to our sense of identity and how we see the world and how we think about the world.
What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?
...there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the policy of overlooking secondary consequences.
In this lies almost the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond...
–Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt
The political meaning of “affordable housing” is housing that is made more affordable by politicians intervening to create government subsidies, rent control or other gimmicks for which politicians can take credit. Affordable housing produced by market forces provides no benefit to politicians and has no attraction for them.
— Dismantling America: and other controversial essays by Thomas Sowell
There is an epidemic afoot of epistemic hubris combined with the will to throw the first punch.
The content of your character is not graded on an intersectional curve and your good behavior in one context doesn't paper over your malevolent actions toward other human beings in another.
Your character is measured by what you do to the least of us when you think no one is watching or that there will be no consequences.
Individual Rights are neither black nor white.
Life, Liberty, and Property are the values that government pursues to implement universal live-and-let-live, which is the kind of equality we should care most about.
The corruption of “results”-oriented racial reform is that it separates racial reform from all accountability to the actual development of excellence and merit in black Americans.” — White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
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“To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks.”
— White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
“…since the sixties, black leaders have made one overriding argument: that blacks cannot achieve equality without white America taking primary responsibility for it.” — White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
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“between individual volition and general outcomes are systemic factors which limit or determine what will survive, creating a pattern, rather than chaos.”— Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
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“Intellectuals who have never run any business have been remarkably confident that they know when businesses have been run wrongly or when their owners or managers are overpaid.”— Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
Read MoreIf you think profit makes it hard to do good in the world just try doing any good while you are bleeding money.
Francis Luong
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
From 1984 by George Orwell.
"“They will try,” Jasnah said, “to define you by something you are not. Don’t let them. I can be a scholar, a woman, a historian, a Radiant. People will still try to classify me by the thing that makes me an outsider. They want, ironically, the thing I don’t do or believe to be the prime marker of my identity. I have always rejected that, and will continue to do so.”
She reached over and put her freehand on his arm. “You are not a heretic, Dalinar Kholin. You are a king, a Radiant, and a father. You are a man with complicated beliefs, who does not accept everything you are told. You decide how you are defined. Don’t surrender that to them. They will gleefully take the chance to define you, if you allow it.”"
From Oathbringer: Book Three of the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
"...It is the concept of original sin that negates morality. If man is guilty by nature, he has no choice about it. If he has no choice, the issue does not belong in the field of morality. Morality pertains only to the sphere of man’s free will – only to those actions, which are open to his choice. To consider man guilty by nature is a contradiction in terms. "
Ayn Rand, from Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand | Playboy
Technology is often psychologically manipulative:
"...the biggest thing to change culturally is the perception that technology they are using is neutral. "
"...we have to recognize that there's a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen whose goal in desiging the way I'm looking at this screen now was not to empower me most to make the life choices of my time that I would want to make, but to... spend [more] time on the screen."
"That's not a pleasant way to live... to be forced to notice all of these steering mechanisms in our lives and and be taxed and vigilant all the time."
"The ideal would be to... only deploy conscious energy... for the choices that matter and to not be forced [to apply our will] to steer away from the donuts."
