Epstein Motivational Quotes

We've also evolved the ability to simply 'pay it forward': I help you, somebody else will help me. I remember hearing a parable when I was younger, about a father who lifts his young son onto his back to carry him across a flooding river. 'When I am older,' said the boy to his father, 'I will carry you across this river as you now do for me.' 'No, you won't,' said the father stoically. 'When you are older you will have your own concerns. All I expect is that one day you will carry your own son across this river as I no do for you.' Cultivating this attitude is an important part of Humanism--to realize that life without God can be much more than a series of strict tit-for-tat transactions where you pay me and I pay you back. Learning to pay it forward can add a tremendous sense of meaning and dignity to our lives. Simply put, it feels good to give to others, whether we get back or not.

Dark horses were on the hunt for match quality. “They never look around and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to fall behind, these people started earlier and have more than me at a younger age,’” Ogas told me. “They focused on, ‘Here’s who I am at the moment, here are my motivations, here’s what I’ve found I like to do, here’s what I’d like to learn, and here are the opportunities. Which of these is the best match right now? And maybe a year from now I’ll switch because I’ll find something better.

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

Experimentation is not a tidy prescription, but it is common, and it has advantages, and it requires more than the typical motivational-poster lip service to a tolerance for failure. Breakthroughs are high variance.

Whatever the IPCC’s motives for omitting the fact of plummeting climate-related disaster deaths, one thing is certain: when the world’s most influential synthesizing institution does not include a crucial variable, what we are told the “experts” think is inevitably and significantly distorted.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end of history illusion.” From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.

Subliminally, the Buddha was saying, we are all tending these fires (of greed, hatred, and delusion), motivated as we are by our insecure place in the world, by the feeling, the dukkha, of not fitting in. The fires of greed, hatred, and delusion are defenses against acknowledging that everything is on fire, instinctive attempts at protecting ourselves from what feels like an impossible situation. The Buddha stressed the burning nature of the world in order to show his listeners what they were afraid of.

Whatever we once were,” Obama says on the video, “we’re no longer a Christian nation.”[464] He added, “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values.… This is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do.”[465

As the legal historian Richard Epstein memorably put it, the “ink was scarcely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which forbade the government as well as employers from taking race into account for any reason, when policies of racial discrimination began proliferating throughout the public and private sectors. In the historical blink of an eye, colorblindness transformed from an idea whose time had finally come into a symptom of moral backwardness—from a noble principle responsible for beating slavery and Jim Crow into a marker of evil. In the half century since the victories of the civil rights movement, some of America’s most celebrated scholars have been hard at work writing a false history of colorblindness. In their view, colorblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was instead an idea created by white racists, conservatives, and reactionaries. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a black-studies professor at the University of California, writes that colorblindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.” According to these scholars, there is no contradiction to reconcile: colorblindness had nothing to do with abolition or the civil rights movement to begin with; colorblindness has instead always been a Trojan horse for white supremacy.

But the “golden rule” is golden because it’s a simple, easy-to-understand reminder that there are many reasons to be good, beyond God—and, in fact, God may not even be the real motivating force behind the good behavior of many pious people.

Unless one is willing to believe that the Putin regime acted out of purely altruistic motives in exfiltrating this American intelligence worker to Moscow, the only plausible explanation for its actions in Hong Kong was that it recognized Snowden’s potential as an espionage source.

As a philosopher who has studied the history of ideas extensively, I have long been haunted by the fact that some of the worst ideas in history (such as slavery, racism, and eugenics) were successfully spread as the consensus of “the experts.” This fact has motivated me to think extensively about the questions: How do I rely on experts responsibly? How do I gain the crucial benefit of acting on expert knowledge while avoiding becoming one of the many people throughout history who supports something very wrong because they were told the “experts” endorsed it?

Mr. Epstein is a cradle-to-the-grave ideologue. A leftist but nonetheless an ideologue.” “What’s an ideologue?” “Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up,” he said. “When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He’ll incinerate half the planet to save the other half and never understand his own motivations.” “What are his motivations?” “Control, power, penis envy, addiction to breast-feeding, the fact that most of them are born ugly, God only knows. In one night, ten men like Mr.

William Holden had his own approach. "Take any picture you can. One out of four will be good, one out of ten will be very good and one out of fifteen will get you an Oscar.

Personally, I can do very little, but I can contribute to a whole chain of events, and that's a marvelous feeling. It's like a bonus to me towards the end of my life. It gives me a voice." (Audrey Hepburn)

The whole concept of what a good life ought to look like also changed with the secular revolution. A good life used to mean a life of suffering. Why? Because nearly everyone was suffering so much from lack of decent food, shelter, medicine, and leisure time that the best way to prevent panic was to assert that "your suffering is good for you." So Jesus became a suffering role model. Buddhism cultivated meditative techniques as an escape from worldly suffering. And African American slaves sang of the redemption their protracted pain would bring them in the next life. But the Enlightenment propagated a new (to most people), Humanistic view of a good life. This new view was made possible by new science and technology that made commerce, communication, and existence in general easier. It was motivated by horror at the centuries of religiously inspired mass murder that had terrorized Europe. It was influenced by Epicurus and Lucretius as well as the Roman Cicero and other early human-centered thinkers. And it was expressed in manifold ways by brilliant writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and others whose work is now considered among the foundation stones of contemporary Humanist philosophy. But our view was first "canonized" in the Declaration of Independence,most likely by Thomas Jefferson: that all people are equally deserving of an opportunity to pursue happiness and to be free of suffering in this life (rather than be redeemed by it in the next life). My late mentor Sherwin Wine used to say that he knew that his mother had a pre-secular revolution mind-set because she didn't understand how to be "happy." Suffering, she could take. But happiness? Oy! What is there to be so happy about - the world is a mess!