Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
History matters. It matters whether we tell the truth about what happened centuries ago, and it matters whether we tell the truth about more recent history. It matters because if we can't we will never be able to face the present, guaranteeing that our future will be doomed.
Being rational - along with being clear and honest - are important if we are to create the needed shift in fundamental thinking necessary to make it possible to pull this world back from the brink of multiple disasters on ecological, cultural, political, and economic fronts.
Most of the problems that plague our society - addiction, overeating, crime, domestic violence, prejudice, debt, unwanted pregnancy, educational failure, underperformance at school and work, lack of savings, failure to exercise - are in some degree a failure of self-control.
The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation.
Pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.
The problem I see with utilitarianism, or any form of consequentialism, is not that it gets the wrong answers to moral questions. I think just about any moral theory, worked out intelligently, and applied with good judgment, would get just about the same results as any other.
I think the biggest difference is that I've noticed Western parents seem much more concerned about their children's psyches, their self-esteem, whereas tough immigrant parents assume strength rather than fragility in their children and therefore behave completely differently.
Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management, that's deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession.
Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.
In making policy designed with copyright in mind, you end up making decisions about whether other important technologies, such as privacy-enhancing or file-search technologies, should be encouraged or discouraged. A collision is happening between creativity and protecting IP.
You could double the number of synaptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a result of experience and learning. The reason for that was that long-term memory alters the expression of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections.
Every patient tends to bury the most important story inside some other story, just the way new writers often 'bury the lede.' 'Burying the lede' is an old journalism term for when you only find out the real point about halfway into the article, but it also applies to therapy.
[ Massachusetts constitution] was [John Adams] attempt to justify that structure by the traditional notion of social estates - that the executive represented the monarchical estate, the senate the aristocratic estate, and the house of representatives the estate of the people.
Religion's pretty pervasive in humans. And why it's pervasive in humans is debated a lot. There are indications of things that look like religion in other animals, like chimps doing rain dances, and that sort of thing. Actually, I say that, but there's that and not much else.
If you're sick, first you have to associate your sickness with a food. Then you have to report it to your doctor. Then the doctor reports it to some state authority. The state authority reports it to the federal authority. By the time all that happens, two weeks have gone by.
There is no effort to acknowledge some equivalent accountability by associating "terrorism" with all violence that is deliberately aimed at civilians, either directly or as foreseeable effects of violent acts, whether the actor is a non-state individual or group or the state.
I am quite confident that there are numerous discussions going in various "deep states" throughout the world about how to contain Trump's America geopolitically and economically, given the early indications that his policies will intensify conflict in many parts of the world.
Women of child-bearing age steadily run out of eggs by the continuous process of cell death. While reading a copy of the Guardian carefully from cover to cover, a normal woman will have lost on average two eggs - while, typically, a normal man will have made 70,000 new sperm.
What I'm seeing is a generation that says consistently, 'I would rather text than make a telephone call.' Why? It's less risky. I can just get the information out there. I don't have to get all involved; it's more efficient. I would rather text than see somebody face to face.
The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contained all the words of God he intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history, and that it now contains all the words of God we need for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly.
To make sense of bossiness, we need to tease apart two fundamental aspects of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power lies in holding a formal position of authority or controlling important resources. Status involves being respected or admired.
I was raised by extremely strict - but also extremely loving - Chinese immigrant parents, and I had the most wonderful childhood! I remember laughing constantly with my parents - my dad is a real character and very funny. I certainly did wish they allowed to me do more things!
Baidu's AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish. After Baidu, I am excited to continue working toward the AI transformation of our society and the use of AI to make life better for everyone.
There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response.
You know that saying 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'? That's so true of positive psychology. Our latest research tells us that the pursuit of happiness is a delicate art. Certain approaches to seeking happiness are now known to backfire, whereas others are effective.
Capitalism has taught us that markets are always more efficient than hierarchical managerial coordination. But in a situation where those three conditions aren't met, I can't outsource or partner with you because markets don't function in the absence of sufficient information.
Through our evolution, we're so specialized for social interaction. So, if you can really design robots that can interact with people, in this very natural, interpersonal way, I think that would be great. You wouldn't have to have people read manuals, in order to operate them.
Cities begin to use cultural production as a way to market their city as being unique and special. Of course, the problem with this is that much of culture is very easy to replicate. The uniqueness begins to disappear. Then, we have what I call the "Disneyfication" of society.
So we draw lines around our property, our counties, our cities, our states, our countries. And, boy, do we act as if those lines are important. I mean, we go to war. We will kill and die to protect those boundaries. Nature couldn't give two hoots about our national boundaries.
If you're not being pessimistic, you're not being very realistic. But I think one must always have hope, and when you have children, of course, you have no choice but to work your tail off to try and protect the future for your children. And that is infused by hope in the end.
I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].
In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychoanalysis swept through the intellectual community, and it was the dominant mode of thinking about the mind. People felt that this was a completely new set of insights into human motivation, and that its therapeutic potential was significant.
I would not say that ethical behavior is not possible for the atheist or agnostic. It is. A couple of pretty good examples are Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, I will have to say that if we take the human lot as a whole, these two men must be seen as exceptions.
Personal growth and professional development require mostly being treated like an adult, which is pretty much the opposite of what happens in most workplaces. People need to be able to make decisions. To do that effectively, they need information and training in how to use it.
A church that is deeply aware of it's misery and nakedness before a holy God will cling tenaciously to an all sufficient Savior, while one that is self-confident and relatively unaware of its inherent sinfulness will reach for religion and morality whenever it seems convenient
For reasons that have stunningly little to do with crime or crime rates, we, as a nation, have chosen to lock up more than two million people behind bars. Millions more are on probation or parole, or branded felons for life and thus locked into a permanent second-class status.
Apocalyptic expectations ran riot in 1917, and had a major influence on Allied policies towards Palestine and the Jewish people. The propaganda of all nations was amazingly religious and apocalyptic - ghosts and visions, crucifixions and sacrifice, crusaders and holy warriors.
It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'
In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.
Americans keep telling me they hate government. I always tell them: "Man, I've got a country for you: Go to Afghanistan; they don't have one." So if you're of that ilk, yes, you can have your private paradise, but if you're comfortable with government, then go with government.
I am looking into quite a few ideas in parallel and exploring new AI businesses that I can build. One thing that excites me is finding ways to support the global AI community so that people everywhere can access the knowledge and tools that they need to make AI transformations.
Google Brain, which I led, was arguably the single biggest force for turning Google into a great A.I. company. I'm pretty sure I led the team that transformed Baidu as well. So one thing that really excites me is the potential for other companies to become great A.I. companies.
Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It's this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you.
We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.
It’s for you to decide whether change is right for you right now. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But either way keep the growth mindset in your thoughts then when you bump up against obstacles you can turn to it, it will always be there for you showing you a path into the future.
Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery which the cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as the mystery of the cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest.
If I gave you now, $10 as a gift, how happy would you be? Would you be happy, is the marginal $10, the best use of $10 you can use? Of course not. If I have you a CD, you know exactly what you are getting and you will have a value for it. So, money has lots of problems with it.
We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common.
Perhaps more significant than his experience in Europe, though, was [John] Adams's experience in his own country, and his extensive reading on the history of the English constitution. In 1779, he had an opportunity to try out his ideas by framing the Massachusetts constitution.
I never thought of that one, that linguistics could be driving cultural things. There are some thoughts that that does happen in humans, that languages have different characteristics and that influences in some ways how different groups behave, and I suppose it might in whales.