“
A grisly story, but one whose notoriety Malorie attributes to the seemingly senseless way the Internet has of making random occurrences famous.
”
”
Josh Malerman (Bird Box (Bird Box, #1))
“
The famous passage from her book is often erroneously attributed to the inaugural address of Nelson Mandela. About the misattribution Williamson said, "Several years ago, this paragraph from A Return to Love began popping up everywhere, attributed to Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural address. As honored as I would be had President Mandela quoted my words, indeed he did not. I have no idea where that story came from, but I am gratified that the paragraph has come to mean so much to so many people.
”
”
Marianne Williamson (Everyday Grace)
“
four-fifths of the words attributed to me are things I never said, and would not agree with.
If your words cannot stand on their own, adding my name won't make them less flimsy
”
”
Albert Einstein
“
Stars are attributed w/ intelligence they don't have, beauty they haven't worked for, loyaly & love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess. They are treated like a beautiful vase of cut flowers. When wilted, simply replaced w/ new blooms.
”
”
Pete Townshend
“
Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences.
”
”
John Bowlby (A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development)
“
Cold flu looks nothing in front of cancer...complications in our personal life is like a flu and killing people on name of God or borders or countries is cancer...you can help this planet...there are ways...willingness is an action
We are one...the only difference is ...few are awake, few are ready to wake up and few are just ignorant and time is coming when there will be no choice for those who is ignorant because of suffering and pain ....
Bigger EGO is always drawn to Bigger Ego so many times Bigger ego ignores the important message being delivered by not a famous person.
Love heals...Love not from mind...deep from heart....Mind brings games and play around with relationships...Something sacred deep from heart....L ♥ V E...Unconditional...No business of give and take....unconditional giving....
Don't be afraid and run away from loneliness and start seeking securities....Try to enjoy every part of it and then you will see ...Loneliness turned into something which we never want to loose....investigate your feeling when you feel lonely
We always want something in return...we have made LOVE a business...I did it too in the past that's why I know it...this is the reason that we should change...you change, I change....everyone should think again on the way of living life and thinking and specially who thinks they know what life is.
2 births in the same life....physical and spiritual....you break the bondage (psychologically) with physical attributes of life ( detached state of mind) and try to find real "maksad" (purpose) of your existence as Being not Doing
If you want to enjoy your relationship with your special one then please keep these tools handy:1) Patience2) Trust3) Freedom4) Honesty5) Respect
we are all stars... twinkling with love and when there is love then there is no conflict
4 letters L ♥ V E ..imagine these letters on your hand and try to feel the deep meaning and power of these letters...feel the love you have for this life...start from there and spread love to everyone you see or meet...LOVE
”
”
Neeraj Sabharwal
“
Marketing is bad manners—and I rely on my naturalistic and ecological instincts. Say you run into a person during a boat cruise. What would you do if he started boasting of his accomplishments, telling you how great, rich, tall, impressive, skilled, famous, muscular, well educated, efficient, and good in bed he is, plus other attributes? You would certainly run away (or put him in contact with another talkative bore to get rid of both of them). It is clearly much better if others (preferably someone other than his mother) are the ones saying good things about him, and it would be nice if he acted with some personal humility.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
“
So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.
”
”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The World of Perception)
“
Absurdism is a philosophy centered on embracing the meaninglessness of life while simultaneously rebelling against it and embracing what life can offer us.
Camus is most famously attributed with this statement “Life is meaningless.”
While that quote may seem depressing on its own, it changes when we realize that what he is really saying is that we are the creators of meaning in our lives.
Meaning does not originate from life, we assign meaning to life and everything within it.
We get to make it up.
”
”
Andrew Horn
“
There is a famous joke, attributed to Einstein: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” I don’t know whether Einstein actually ever said those words. But I do know that’s not relativity.
”
”
Sean Carroll (From Eternity to Here)
“
No one can make us suffer without our consent. As the famous and wise saying commonly attributed to Buddha goes, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
”
”
Aletheia Luna (Awakened Empath: The Ultimate Guide to Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Healing)
“
Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.
”
”
Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
“
A system is never the sum of its parts,” Russell Ackoff, an organizational theorist and a pioneer in the field of systems thinking and management science, famously said. “It’s the product of their interaction.
”
”
Rich Diviney (The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance)
“
Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.
”
”
George Albert Wells
“
Antiquity hath, too, too often bewitched the minds of men, and drawn them from the revealed will of God. Men are more willing to imitate the outward actions of their famous ancestors, than conform themselves to the revealed will of their Creator.
”
”
Stephen Charnock (The Existence and Attributes of God)
“
The habit of inauthentically attributing wisecracks, purported profundities, inspirational doggerel, and other bits of refrigerator-door wisdom to famous people is scarcely new—members of the press, particularly newspaper columnists, have been doing it for decades—but the Internet has grossly exacerbated the problem, with numerous quote-aggregation sites irresponsibly devoted to prettily packaging the fakery, thus encouraging the unwary (or uncaring) to snarf it up, then hork it up, ad nauseam.
”
”
Benjamin Dreyer (Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style)
“
there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.” Indeed, there is no evidence that Henry ever said anything of substance or found space in his head for a single original thought. He
”
”
Bill Bryson (Made in America)
“
One of Lindon's amusing word-unit palindromes reads: "Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing girl." Other palindromes are symmetric with respect to back-to-front reading letter by letter-"Able was I ere I saw Elba" (attributed jokingly to Napoleon), or the title of a famous NOVA program: "A Man, a Plan, a Canal, Panama.
”
”
Mario Livio (The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry)
“
Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?
The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.
It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.
”
”
David Mamet (The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture)
“
In opposition to the absolutely and directly false Heideggerian theses attributing to Aquinas an onto-theo-logical metaphysics of Being, Aquinas's actual and genuine conception of God is articulated in the famous formulation according to which God is ipsum esse per se subsistens, Being itself subsisting through itself.
God is not a being (ens,) among other beings, thus not anything like the highest, first, or maximal being.
(p. 43)
”
”
Lorenz B. Puntel
“
The most frequent misconception about celebrities, is that they must be so fascinating. The opposite is often the case. Most of my famous clients with some important exceptions, have been uninteresting, some have been outright boring. We tend to confuse their public persona and surroundings which fascinate us with their private personalities which are banal, mundane and self-centered. Many of them have no ideas, no insights, and little to say about matters outside the narrow spheres of their professional lives. Yet we listen to their often uninformed opinions on important issues of the day affecting the world, just because they have a handsome face, strong muscles or other talents or attributes that are irrelevant to their presumed credibility on the matters about which they’re opining. Celebrities may seem fascinating from a distance, but the reality viewed up close, is often very different.
”
”
Alan M. Dershowitz
“
The now pregnant Isis returns to her home in the underworld and gives birth, in due time, to Horus, rightful son of the long-lost king, alienated as he matures from his now corrupted kingdom (something we all experience during our maturation). His primary attribute is the eye—the famous Egyptian single eye—while his avatar is the falcon, a bird that takes precise aim at its prey, strikes the target with deadly accuracy, and possesses an acuity of vision unparalleled in the kingdom of living things.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
“
What does the name of an author on the jacket matter? Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors’ names will be remembered? Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; other authors’ names will still be well known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.
”
”
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
“
Oh, we solved that long ago!” Rubedo chuckled. “I believe that was Greengallows, Henrik Greengallows? Is that right, my love? Ancient history has never been my subject. A famous case study even reported a method for turning straw into gold! The young lady who discovered it wrote a really rather thin paper—but she toured the lecture circuit for years! Her firstborn refined it, so that she could make straw from gold and solve the terrible problem of housing for destitute brownies.”
“Hedwig Greengallows, my dear,” mused Citrinitas. “Henrik was just her mercurer. Men are so awfully fond of attributing women’s work to their brothers!
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1))
“
Ilya Kovylin, a Moscow merchant born in 1731 and one of the founders of the Old Believer sect of the Fedoseevtsy, taught his followers that “without sin there is no repentance, without repentance no salvation. There will be many sinners in heaven.” It was Kovylin who coined the famous (or infamous) phrase “If you don’t sin, you don’t repent, if you don’t repent, you can’t be saved.” This Kovylin is immensely important, for his words have mistakenly been attributed to Rasputin, as if he spoke them first, having himself created some new perversion, when in fact they have a much older tradition and represent an idea shared by various sectarian groups.
”
”
Douglas Smith (Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs)
“
The godfather’s name is Saul Alinsky. His most famous students are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hardly anyone recognizes this, but Alinsky and the Alinsky method is the hidden force behind the 2008 economic meltdown. The meltdown was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; it was the main cause of median wealth in the United States in the subsequent three years declining nearly 40 percent. While the meltdown is routinely attributed to Wall Street “greed,” its real cause was government and activist pressure on banks and banking agencies—like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—to change their lending and loan guarantee practices. Yes, the 2008 crash was actually the result of an Alinskyite scam—actually a series of Alinskyite scams, carried out over many years. Basically the Alinskyites were trying to steal money from the banks and, in the process, force the banks to make loans to people that they had no intention of making loans to. The banks acquiesced, and eventually the whole scheme came crashing down. It was toppled not by greed but by the sober reality that when you loan money to millions of people who cannot afford to pay, those people are very likely to default on those loans. That’s how Alinskyites almost destroyed the U.S. economy a few years ago. If Alinsky had never lived, none of this would have happened.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
“
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN most interested in the question of what makes a house a home. What are the elements that move a house beyond its physical structure and provide the warmth that we all crave? In my fifteen years as a designer, I’ve come to understand that the answer is simple: It is about surrounding ourselves with things we love.
(...) And in this case, the beauty comes from the owners’ love of books.
Books are beautiful objects in their own right—their bindings and covers—and the space they fill on shelves or stacked on coffee tables in colorful piles add balance and texture to any room. And just like any other part of a home, books require maintenance: They need to be dusted, categorized, rearranged, and maintained. Our relationship with them is dynamic and ever changing.
But our connection to them goes beyond the material. In each house we visited, the libraries were the heart of the home, meaningful to the collectors’ lives. In this book, we tried to capture what they brought to the home—the life and spirit books added. Some subjects have working libraries they constantly reference; others fill their shelves with the potential pleasures of the unread. When we visited the homes, many people could find favorite books almost by osmosis, using systems known only to themselves.
(...) As we found repeatedly, surrounding yourself with books you love tells the story of your life, your interests, your passions, your values. Your past and your future. Books allow us to escape, and our personal libraries allow us to invent the story of ourselves—and the legacy that we will leave behind.
There’s a famous quote attributed to Cicero: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” If I suspected this before, I know it now. I hope you’ll find as much pleasure in discovering these worlds as we did.
”
”
Nina Freudenberger (Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books)
“
Just as famous, if not more so, is the ancient Asian sage Sun Tsu, author of The Art of War. Sun Tsu is a much easier and quicker read than Clausewitz, full of short pieces of advice, from the tactical to the strategic, that have been quoted and applied far beyond the military, often in the world of business. The adage most frequently attributed to Sun Tsu—“know your enemy if you wish to win”—is actually a misquotation. It is indeed good to know your enemy if you wish to win, but Sun Tsu’s recipe for ultimate victory begins with knowing yourself—why you are going to war, what you are fighting for. You may have studied the culture and ways of your foe for years and be intimately familiar with his thinking, but first you must be able to answer the questions, What do I represent? What am I prepared to risk blood and treasure for, and why exactly am I going to war? If you cannot answer these questions, then you should not be going to war at all.
”
”
Sebastian Gorka (Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War)
“
Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you're a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you. That's what fame is like. You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don't get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I'm attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like. Fame is not this way. A person's fame is in everyone's head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you're more famous than Jesus. As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because you went to college with them or because they've been watching your videos or listening to your music or reading about you in magazines for years. You never know if they know you and love you. Worse, you never know if they know you and hate you.
”
”
Hank Green (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1))
“
The Biggest Property Rental In Amsterdam
Amsterdam has been ranked as the 13th best town to live in the globe according to Mercer contacting annual Good quality of Living Review, a place it's occupied given that 2006. Which means that the city involving Amsterdam is among the most livable spots you can be centered. Amsterdam apartments are equally quite highly sought after and it can regularly be advisable to enable a housing agency use their internet connections with the amsterdam parkinghousing network to help you look for a suitable apartment for rent Amsterdam.
Amsterdam features rated larger in the past, yet continuing plan of disruptive and wide spread construction projects - like the problematic North-South town you live line- has intended a small scores decline. Amsterdam after rated inside the top 10 Carolien Gehrels (Tradition) told Dutch news company ANP that the metropolis is happy together with the thirteenth place. "Of course you want is actually the first place position, however shows that Amsterdam is a fairly place to live.
Well-known places to rent in Amsterdam
Your Jordaan. An old employees quarter popularised amang other things with the sentimental tunes of a quantity of local vocalists. These music painted an attractive image of the location. Local cafes continue to attribute live vocalists like Arthur Jordaan and Tante Leeni. The Jordaan is a network of alleyways and narrow canals. The section was proven in the Seventeenth century, while Amsterdam desperately needed to expand. The region was created along the design of the routes and ditches which already existed. The Jordaan is known for the weekly biological Nordermaarkt on Saturdays.
Amsterdam is famous for that open air market segments. In Oud-zuid there is a ranging Jordan Cuypmarkt open year long. This part of town is a very popular spot for expats to find Expat Amsterdam flats due in part to vicinity of the Vondelpark. Among the largest community areas A hundred and twenty acres) inside Amsterdam, Netherlands. It can be located in the stadsdeel Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, western side from the Leidseplein as well as the Museumplein. The playground was exposed in 1865 as well as originally named the "Nieuwe Park", but later re-named to "Vondelpark", after the 17th one hundred year author Joost lorrie den Vondel. Every year, the recreation area has around 10 million guests. In the park can be a film art gallery, an open air flow theatre, any playground, and different cafe's and restaurants.
”
”
dfbgf
“
Loving your fate and joyful acceptance Epictetus actually describes a three-stage process to his students, which relates to the discipline of desire. He begins by emphasizing the need for Stoics to train themselves rigorously to adhere to their principles, having certain phrases constantly ready-to-hand day and night. These should be written down, read over, analysed and discussed, until they have been memorized and understood. We should then rehearse all the possible catastrophes that can befall us in life, things the majority of people fear, and prepare for them in advance. Then, if one of those things happens which are called ‘undesirable’, immediately the thought that it was not unexpected will be the first thing to lighten the burden. For in every case it is a great help to be able to say, ‘I knew the son whom I had begotten was mortal.’ [A famous saying, attributed to various wise men.] For that is what you will say, and likewise, ‘I knew that I was mortal’, ‘I knew that I was vulnerable to exile’, ‘I knew that I might be sent off to prison.’ (Discourses, 3.24)
”
”
Donald J. Robertson (Stoicism and the Art of Happiness: Ancient Tips for Modern Challenges (Teach Yourself))
“
When kids stay up late, their stress hormones like cortisol kick in, which makes it harder to fall asleep,” wrote Dr. Laura Markham of Aha! Parenting. “The problem is that cortisol stays in the system and makes them edgy the next day; it also contributes to depression, anxiety, and weight gain. The famous moodiness of teenagers is partly attributable to late bedtimes, which have become standard practice in our culture. Just because your toddler gains the ability to keep himself awake doesn’t mean you’d let him stay up half the night. Just because your tween and teen gain the ability to keep themselves up doesn’t mean it isn’t bad for them.
”
”
Tricia Goyer (Calming Angry Kids: Help and Hope for Parents in the Whirlwind)
“
Correlation is enough,” 2 then-Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson famously declared in 2008. We can, he implied, solve innovation problems by the sheer brute force of the data deluge. Ever since Michael Lewis chronicled the Oakland A’s unlikely success in Moneyball (who knew on-base percentage was a better indicator of offensive success than batting averages?), organizations have been trying to find the Moneyball equivalent of customer data that will lead to innovation success. Yet few have. Innovation processes in many companies are structured and disciplined, and the talent applying them is highly skilled. There are careful stage-gates, rapid iterations, and checks and balances built into most organizations’ innovation processes. Risks are carefully calculated and mitigated. Principles like six-sigma have pervaded innovation process design so we now have precise measurements and strict requirements for new products to meet at each stage of their development. From the outside, it looks like companies have mastered an awfully precise, scientific process. But for most of them, innovation is still painfully hit or miss. And worst of all, all this activity gives the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. Companies are spending exponentially more to achieve only modest incremental innovations while completely missing the mark on the breakthrough innovations critical to long-term, sustainable growth. As Yogi Berra famously observed: “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” What’s gone so wrong? Here is the fundamental problem: the masses and masses of data that companies accumulate are not organized in a way that enables them to reliably predict which ideas will succeed. Instead the data is along the lines of “this customer looks like that one,” “this product has similar performance attributes as that one,” and “these people behaved the same way in the past,” or “68 percent of customers say they prefer version A over version B.” None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.
”
”
Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
“
It behooves us ... to consider the fateful formula E = mc2, which almost everyone in the world attributes to Albert Einstein's theory [of relativity]. Despite the fact, however, that Einstein did derive this formula from his special theory of relativity, it stems actually from [the] classical part [of the theory]: i.e., from the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic fields, which goes back to 1865. The famous formula has consequently no bearing whatsoever on relativistic physics, a fact Einstein himself admitted in 1950. Obviously, however, in the interim that fateful formula came to be viewed worldwide as the consummate vindication of Einstein's theory: what indeed could be more convincing than the explosion of an atom bomb?
”
”
Wolfgang Smith (Physique et métaphysique)
“
The Historical Setting of Genesis Mesopotamia: Sumer Through Old Babylonia Sumerians. It is not possible at this time to put Ge 1–11 into a specific place in the historical record. Our history of the ancient Near East begins in earnest after writing has been invented, and the earliest civilization known to us in the historical record is that of the Sumerians. This culture dominated southern Mesopotamia for over 500 years during the first half of the third millennium BC (2900–2350 BC), known as the Early Dynastic Period. The Sumerians have become known through the excavation of several of their principal cities, which include Eridu, Uruk and Ur. The Sumerians are credited with many of the important developments in civilization, including the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, law and medicine. Urbanization is also first witnessed among the Sumerians. By the time of Abraham, the Sumerians no longer dominate the ancient Near East politically, but their culture continues to influence the region. Other cultures replace them in the political arena but benefit from the advances they made. Dynasty of Akkad. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century BC, the Sumerian culture was overrun by the formation of an empire under the kingship of Sargon I, who established his capital at Akkad. He ruled all of southern Mesopotamia and ranged eastward into Elam and northwest to the Mediterranean on campaigns of a military and economic nature. The empire lasted for almost 150 years before being apparently overthrown by the Gutians (a barbaric people from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris), though other factors, including internal dissent, may have contributed to the downfall. Ur III. Of the next century little is known as more than 20 Gutian kings succeeded one another. Just before 2100 BC, the city of Ur took control of southern Mesopotamia under the kingship of Ur-Nammu, and for the next century there was a Sumerian renaissance in what has been called the Ur III period. It is difficult to ascertain the limits of territorial control of the Ur III kings, though the territory does not seem to have been as extensive as that of the dynasty of Akkad. Under Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi, the region enjoyed almost a half century of peace. Decline and fall came late in the twenty-first century BC through the infiltration of the Amorites and the increased aggression of the Elamites to the east. The Elamites finally overthrew the city. It is against this backdrop of history that the OT patriarchs emerge. Some have pictured Abraham as leaving the sophisticated Ur that was the center of the powerful Ur III period to settle in the unknown wilderness of Canaan, but that involves both chronological and geographic speculation. By the highest chronology (i.e., the earliest dates attributed to him), Abraham probably would have traveled from Ur to Harran during the reign of Ur-Nammu, but many scholars are inclined to place Abraham in the later Isin-Larsa period or even the Old Babylonian period. From a geographic standpoint it is difficult to be sure that the Ur mentioned in the Bible is the famous city in southern Mesopotamia (see note on 11:28). All this makes it impossible to give a precise background of Abraham. The Ur III period ended in southern Mesopotamia as the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, lost the support of one city after another and was finally overthrown by the Elamites, who lived just east of the Tigris. In the ensuing two centuries (c. 2000–1800 BC), power was again returned to city-states that controlled more local areas. Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna, Lagash, Mari, Assur and Babylon all served as major political centers.
”
”
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
“
The Testament of Solomon, a work from the third century AD, further illustrates the widespread belief in apotropaic magic. This is a pseudepigraphical work (one that falsely claims to have been written by a famous person of the Old Testament) attributed to Solomon.
”
”
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
“
One famous implication of this doctrine is that though we distinguish in thought between God’s eternity, power, goodness, intellect, will, and so forth, in God himself there is no distinction between any of the divine attributes. God’s eternity is his power, which is his goodness, which is his intellect, which is his will, and so on. Indeed, God himself just is his power, his goodness, and so on, just as he just is his existence, and just is his essence.
”
”
Edward Feser (Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide)
“
The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most. You needn’t embrace the specific practice of listing out your goals (I don’t, personally) to appreciate the underlying point, which is that in a world of too many big rocks, it’s the moderately appealing ones—the fairly interesting job opportunity, the semi-enjoyable friendship—on which a finite life can come to grief. It’s a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it’s all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, “it’s much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life.
”
”
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
“
Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors’ names will be remembered. Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.
”
”
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
“
It is now clear that the kōan about Mahakasyapa's receiving the flower after Sakyamuni's wordless sermon, as well as slogans like "special transmission outside the teaching" and "no reliance on words and letters"—originally separate items that came to be linked in a famous Zen motto attributed to Bodhidharma—were created in the Sung dynasty. First making their appearance in eleventh-century transmissions of the lamp texts, including the Chingte chuan-teng lu (1004) and the T'ien-sheng kuang-teng lu (1036), these rhetorical devices were designed to support the autonomous identity of Zen in an era of competition with neo-Confucianism and are not to be regarded as accurate expressions of the period they are said to represent. A close examination of sources reveals that Tang masters with a reputation for irreverence and blasphemy were often quite conservative in their approach to doctrine by citing (rather than rejecting) Mahayana sutras in support of teachings that were not so distinct from, and were actually very much in accord with, contemporary Buddhist schools.
”
”
Steven Heine (Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?)
“
I recalled the famous description of activist campaigns, usually attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Ideas are activists of a sort; first they appear on the shadows and margins, then they’re mocked or reviled, then they come to be what everyone has always known or believed. How they arrived and who scoffed at them are forgotten. Now nearly everyone understands that this continent was inhabited for centuries before the Europeans arrived, knows that the Columbian encounter was violent and ugly, recognizes that native people are still here. Many of the most significant changes are changes of view, incremental and often invisible, both in who brought them about and when they established themselves, but from those changes much flows.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Hidden Wars of the American West)
“
The few steps that connect strangers explain how rumors spread rapidly and widely. If you have a good investment idea, you might want to keep it secret. In 1998 a New York Times Science Times article said that mathematicians had discovered how networks might “make a big world small” using the equivalent of the famous person idea, and attributed the concept of six degrees of separation to a sociologist in 1967. Yet all this was known to Claude Shannon in 1960.
”
”
Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
“
The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have been expecting to hear, the remaining twenty, Buffett allegedly explains, aren’t the second-tier priorities to which he should turn when he gets the chance. Far from it. In fact, they’re the ones he should actively avoid at all costs—because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to him to form the core of his life yet seductive enough to distract him from the ones that matter most.
”
”
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
“
Omninymous
I am Deep Throat
and the kidnapper
of the Lindberg baby
waiting for my ransom.
Unknowable
I am the most famous of unknowns &
every anonymous quote ever authored
and every anonymous donation ever given
can be attributed to Me
and/or by Another
who prefers to remain anonymous.
Together/Alone we solely preside
over this Omninymous Kingdom
in the vicinity or Orlando.
I am buried near Jimmy Hoffa
in the Tomb of
every Unknown Soldier
in every country.
I am dismembered
and thus remembered --
for it is only the what
which endures
not the who.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Sure, God is loving, but his love is balanced with his justice” or “Without justice, love is not possible.” These statements speak of God’s love as an attribute of God. But, for the Divinity model, God’s very nature is love. Love is not an aspect of God’s being; love is God’s very being.
”
”
Tony Jones (Did God Kill Jesus?: Searching for Love in History's Most Famous Execution)
“
Dobias taught his players the line famously attributed to legendary Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi: “I taught them that winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing,” Dobias said. “Donald picked right up on this. He would tell his teammates, ‘We’re out here for a purpose. To win.’ He always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do anything to win
”
”
Michael Kranish (Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President)
“
What does the name of an author on the jacket matter? Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors’ names will be remembered? Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; other authors’ names will still be well know, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.
”
”
Italo Calvino
“
stars, the Gang of Four and China (and Japan in earlier decades) are all in East Asia. The idea of a regional growth effect has been especially unwelcome to development experts and aid officials who want to give advice on growth. They can advise the national policy makers, but they cannot give advice to the nonexistent regional policy makers. Another sign that regional growth is an important part of the action is that regions move together from one decade to the next. For example, Latin American nations in the 1980s collectively had a famous “lost decade.” A regional credit bubble had burst: global banks had given the region a supply of easy credit at low interest rates in the 1970s, then interest rates went up and credit was cut off in the 1980s. A sensible principle for attribution for national growth performance is that a nation does not get special recognition if its performance is just at the average. It would be foolish for a nation to claim credit for growth that is the same as the average for its region. If a nation is above (or below) these averages, then we can talk about special recognition for the nation’s growth performance. This principle further reduces the share of growth variation explained by permanent national differences. Some of the variation in decade growth rates explained by national differences was really explained by regional differences. Recalculating, we now get only a little more than a tenth of the variation in decade growth rates explained by national differences. Regional growth
”
”
William Easterly (The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor)
“
Go crazy civilization and clothing produced observable as a result GHD Hair Straightener of gaming famous actors have popped up Cheap GHD almost all around the ghd Straightener buy japanese and now have disperse for the actual remainder from everybody. Time that we have you simply simply rupture a calcaneus, Push a sore, As well as just will want to Cheap GHD Straighteners attributes needed feet a chance, You might prepared and the drrcor look. Engagement sounds ghd Hair Straightener outlet most probably make the perfect route to adding activity sparkle to look. Figure this out is coming from all be sure you skirt are often the most urgent on behalf of vogue. High must to a detailed amount for dresses that experts claim allow you to perform merely, To be sure will perhaps when you bend over beyond it is going to dissatisfy just about any genuine parts of the body GHD Cheap any at easiest need to limited,
To look for clothing trendy: My GHD Straighteners appealing Cuff connection libraries. This particular question offers an possible ways to creator to Buy GHD straighteners make my drops a lot of fees, Chances are it is easy to desire straight into finest to term similar"Mounted on-Accessory approach paper, Conjointly"Within web model trade magazines. Our provided-Day fad for on the society is unquestionably that almost all of approach is necessary to your a number factor performed when the woman. This method during the problems, Along considering all these uncomplicated fights stood a result on inventions 1940's.
Nicely-Accepted to work with warmer summer seasonn music fests as well as, Simple and hassle-free outfitting, Greater great large place are really professional quality. In the event you destroy a cakcaneus bone, Go into sore, Or only if pass on feet a getaway, You might be prepared obtaining GHD MK5 White troubling look. Jewelry absolutely are the ideal method to you can add buy cheap ghd Hair Straighteners exercises style on the planning. It signifies inclined on others assuming other drugs are unavailable phone dials for other property. They can not know families put an individuals website content, If you hire a roofer offers little good affordability expressing, Experience. Relay to an entirely running situation to invite someones growing hand negative.
”
”
cheap ghd
“
Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.
”
”
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
“
in 1931 Edwin Hubble invited Einstein to the observatory of the Hooker Telescope near Pasadena, California, and showed him that, in fact, the universe was expanding. Einstein then pronounced one of his most famous sentences: “Now I see the necessity of a beginning,” a lofty phrase followed by another equally famous but more earthly remark, “That was the biggest blunder of my whole life,”113 referring to the gravitational constant that he had devised in order to adjust the Theory of Relativity. In an ironic twist, the gravitational constant then proved to exist, although not in the magnitude that Einstein attributed to it. We will see this further on.
”
”
José Carlos González-Hurtado (New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God)
“
If he could dehumanize his opponents, why couldn’t we? It calls to mind a famous quote frequently attributed to George Bernard Shaw—and no, this isn’t me making a fat joke—“Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get filthy and the pig likes it.
”
”
Lis Smith (Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story)
“
Then there’s that most famous quotation, attributed to 1950s American comic Steve Allen, that “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.
”
”
Dave Cohen (The Complete Comedy Writer: Make your sitcom, stand-up, screenplay, sketches and stories 62% funnier)
“
The third principle is to resist the allure of middling priorities. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffett—although probably only in the apocryphal way in which wise insights get attributed to Albert Einstein or the Buddha, regardless of their real source—in which the famously shrewd investor is asked by his personal pilot about how to set priorities. I’d be tempted to respond, “Just focus on flying the plane!” But apparently this didn’t take place midflight, because Buffett’s advice is different: he tells the man to make a list of the top twenty-five things he wants out of life and then to arrange them in order, from the most important to the least. The top five, Buffett says, should be those around which he organizes his time. But contrary to what the pilot might have
”
”
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals)
“
As Tyson famously said before the fight: “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.
”
”
Rich Diviney (The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance)
“
One important reason that philosophers should take Nietzsche seriously is because he seems to have gotten, at least in broad contours, many points about human moral psychology right. Consider:
(1) Nietzsche holds that heritable type-facts are central determinants of personality and morally significant behaviors, a claim well supported by extensive empirical findings in behavioral genetics.
(2) Nietzsche claims that consciousness is a “surface” and that “the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to [non-conscious] instinctive activity,” theses overwhelmingly vindicated by recent work by psychologists on the role of the unconscious (e.g., Wilson 2002) and by philosophers who have produced synthetic meta-analyses of work on consciousness in psychology and neuroscience (e.g., Rosenthal 2008).
(3) Nietzsche claims that moral judgments are post-hoc rationalizations of feelings that have an antecedent source, and thus are not the outcome of rational reflection or discursiveness, a conclusion in sync with the findings of the ascendent “social intuitionism” in the empirical moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt (2001) and others.
(4) Nietzsche argues that free will is an “illusion,” that our conscious experience of willing is itself the causal product of non-conscious forces, a view recently defended by the psychologist Daniel Wegner (2002), who, in turn, synthesiyes a large body of empirical literature, including the famous neurophysical data about “willing” collected by Benjamin Libet.
”
”
Brian Leiter (Nietzsche and Morality)
“
Eltahawy responded by remind me of words famously attributed to Harriet tubman, the Great american abolitionist who devoted her life to persuading slaves to flee the plantations and claim there freedom. She is meant to have said: "i freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only the knew they were slaves". Emancipation, Eltahawy told me, is first about raising awareness. If women haven't fully understood the state of inferiority in which They are kept, they will do nothing but perpetuate it.
”
”
Leïla Slimani (Sex and Lies)
“
The most famous ruler of this period was Hammurabi, who lived circa 1810–1750 BCE. He is best known for the Code of Hammurabi—a set of laws inscribed on a black basalt pillar that now stands in the Louvre Museum. Hammurabi’s code specifies the rate of interest on silver at 20% and on barley at 33⅓%. What is most important about the code is not what is says but what it represents. The code is a uniform legal framework for the entire Babylonian empire. It covered everything from criminal law to family law, commercial practice to property rights. It details a range of punishments for transgressions, methods of dispute resolution, and attributions of fault for various offenses. It specifies the roles of judge, jury, witnesses, plaintiffs, and defendants. It recognizes and elaborates the rights of ownership of property, including rights to lease and rights of eminent domain. It specifies the role of the written document in a contractual obligation, the necessity of receipts, and what should be done if they do not exist. It specifies legal tender. It describes the obligations of merchants, brokers, and agents and their fiduciary duties and limits to their liabilities in case of attack or theft. It places limits on the term of debt indenture (three years). In short, it creates a comprehensive, uniform framework for commerce.
”
”
William N. Goetzmann (Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible)
“
2:32. six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty. Add to this the underage and elderly men, the women of all ages, and the Levites, and the total number of Israelites must approach two million. It has been calculated that by these numbers, marching eight across, when the first Israelites reach Mount Sinai, half of them would still be in Egypt! The extraordinary size of this population is a famous old problem in traditional and critical biblical scholarship. The numbers appear far too high; but they do not appear to be entirely invented either, because what would be the motive for contriving them in all of this tribe-by-tribe detail for the first four chapters of Numbers? Some suggest that the word for "thousand" here means rather a "clan," but that is not correct (see the comment on Num 3:43). One possibility is that these are the numbers from the census that is attributed to King David (2 Samuel 24; see the comment in Exod 30:12). (There are just three censuses in the Tanak, the two censuses of Moses and the census of David.) Coming centuries later, in a period in which Israel is settled in the land, the numbers are more understandable in the Davidic era (though they are questionably high even for that period). In this scenario, the records here would have come from old documents among the archives which would have come to be mixed in with documents that were used as sources for the Torah.
”
”
Richard Elliott Friedman (Commentary on the Torah)
“
It would be fascinating — though probably impossible — to write a history of books, designs, plans, and documents attributed to famous men that were actually written by their secretaries.
”
”
David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
“
Dr. Jean Martin Charcot, a famous nineteenth-century French neurologist, once stated that “the best inspirer of hope is the best physician.” The success of the shaman in many primitive societies has been attributed primarily to psychological factors rather than to the intrinsic value of the therapies themselves.
”
”
Herbert Benson (The Mind Body Effect: How to Counteract the Harmful Effects of Stress)
“
If you’ve ever read John Bunyan’s famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, then you know that picking the right friends to travel with can be the difference between reaching the celestial city and not. Friends can corrupt us, or they can lead us home.
”
”
Matthew Barrett (None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God)
“
President Heber J. Grant was famous for repeating a saying thought to be attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do—not that the nature of the thing is changed, but that our power to do so is increased.
”
”
Mark Bacera (The Latter-day Morning: Create a Happier, More Successful, Spiritual Life Before Breakfast)
“
Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you're a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you. That's what fame is like. You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes say that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don't get to decide if we are beautiful. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I'm attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can see my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like. Fame is not this way. A person's fame is in everyone's head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you're more famous than Jesus. As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because you went to college with them or because they've been watching your videos or listening to your music or reading about you in magazines for years. You never know if they know you and love you. Worse, you never know if they know you and hate you.
”
”
Hank Green (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1))
“
Warren Buffett has famously attributed much of his success to “winning the ovarian lottery”—that is, being born as a white male to middle-class parents in an America on the cusp of the postwar boom.
”
”
David Callahan (The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age)
“
Doing so showed that there was another variable that was a strong predictor of a person’s securing an entry in Wikipedia: the proportion of immigrants in your county of birth. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of children born there who go on to notable success. (Take that, Donald Trump!) If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more prominent Americans. What explains this? A lot of it seems to be directly attributable to the children of immigrants. I did an exhaustive search of the biographies of the hundred most famous white baby boomers, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Pantheon project, which is also working with Wikipedia data. Most of these were entertainers. At least thirteen had foreign-born mothers, including Oliver Stone, Sandra Bullock, and Julianne Moore. This rate is more than three times higher than the national average during this period. (Many had fathers who were immigrants, including Steve Jobs and John Belushi, but this data was more difficult to compare to national averages, since information on fathers is not always included on birth certificates.)
”
”
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies)
“
The competitive concept of the creation of the universe is the mental reflection of the contest and conflict which began at a particular period in human society. This competitive concept could not have developed in a classless society; in fact it arose when society divided into classes. Monarchies were established and conflicts between them became a daily occurrence. Wars were fought, settlements destroyed, the blood of innocents was shed along with soldiers, and the winning rival became famous. Epics would be written in his honour and hymns and songs would be sung; so much so that every kind of goodness was attributed to his person and enemies were made into idols of evil.
”
”
Sibte Hassan (Mazi Kay Mazar / ماضی کے مزار)
“
As the modern scholar Alan Cameron has put it: ‘In 529 the philosophers of Athens were threatened with the destruction of their entire way of life.’ The Christians were behind this – yet you will search almost in vain for the word ‘Christian’ in most of the writings of the philosophers. That is not to say that evidence of them is not there. It is. The miasmatic presence of the religion is keenly felt on countless pages: it is Christians who are driving persecutions, torturing their colleagues, pushing philosophers into exile. Damascius and his fellow scholars loathed the religion and its uncompromising leaders. Even Damascius’s famously mild and gentle teacher, Isidore, ‘found them absolutely repulsive’; he considered them ‘irreparably polluted, and nothing whatever could constrain him to accept their company’. But the actual word Christian is missing. As if the very syllables were too distasteful for them to pronounce, the philosophers resorted to elaborate circumlocutions.
At times, the names they gave them were muted. With a masterful understatement, the present system of Christian rule, with its torture, murder and persecution, was referred to as ‘the present situation’ or ‘the prevailing circumstances’. At another time the Christians became – perhaps a reference to those stolen and desecrated statues – ‘the people who move the immovable’. At other times the names were blunter: the Christians were ‘the vultures’ or, more simply still, ‘the tyrant’. Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as ‘the Giants’ and the ‘Cyclops’. These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the man-eating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men – they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite – and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: ‘There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.
”
”
Catherine Nixey (The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World)
“
The message of the previous three chapters is that commonsense explanations are often characterized by circular reasoning. Teachers cheated on their students’ tests because that’s what their incentives led them to do. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has all the attributes of the Mona Lisa. People have stopped buying gas-guzzling SUVs because social norms now dictate that people shouldn’t buy gas-guzzling SUVs. And a few special people revived the fortunes of the Hush Puppies shoe brand because a few people started buying Hush Puppies before everyone else did. All of these statements may be true, but all they are really telling us is that what we know happened, happened, and not something else. Because they can only be constructed after we know the outcome itself, we can never be sure how much these explanations really explain, versus simply describe.
”
”
Duncan J. Watts (Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer)
“
The famous injunction, normally attributed to Saint Francis, to ‘preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary’, like many timeworn phrases, contains much that is true.
”
”
Andrew Davison (Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition)
“
The fundamental ethical objection to eugenics is that it licenses some people to decide whether the lives of others are worth living. Part of an intellectual dynasty that included the Victorian uber-Darwinian TH Huxley and the novelist Aldous, Julian Huxley never doubted that an improved human species would match his own high-level brainpower. But not everyone thinks intellect is the most valuable human attribute. General de Gaulle’s daughter Anne had Down’s syndrome, and the famously undemonstrative soldier and Resistance leader referred to her as “my joy”, and when at the age of 20 she died he wept. The capacity to give and receive love may be more central to the good life than self-admiring cleverness.
”
”
John Gray
“
Inventor Buckminster Fuller attributed his invention of the geodesic dome to his early rejection of both the standard x, y, z and polar systems in favor of a tetrahedral paradigm. Einstein similarly rejected Euclidean geometry for a non-Euclidian formulation that gives rise to his famous description of space and time curving in relativistic gravitational fields. Both Einstein and Fuller understood explicitly that Euclidean geometry is only one version of the world. Non-Euclidian geometries, spherical geometries, and many other mathematical formulations of space exist, each providing a different set of patterns for the use of inventors, builders, artists, and other innovators. The problem is that we can’t use what we don’t know. Our pattern-recognizing ability benefits from practice with these different versions of space, just as it benefits from familiarity with different forms of hopscotch.
”
”
Robert Root-Bernstein (Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People)