Sherlock Holmes. Illustrated (Arthur Conan Sir Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 229-38 | Added on Sunday, 2 November 14 17:37:21 Greenwich Mean Time "From a drop of water," said the writer, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the enquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. By a man's finger nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs -- by each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent enquirer in any case is almost inconceivable." ========== Sherlock Holmes. Illustrated (Arthur Conan Sir Doyle) - Highlight Loc. 267-78 | Added on Sunday, 2 November 14 17:48:08 Greenwich Mean Time "It is simple enough as you explain it," I said, smiling. "You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories." Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine." "Have you read Gaboriau's works?" I asked. "Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?" Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. "Lecoq was a miserable bungler," he said, in an angry voice; "he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid." I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the busy street. "This fellow may be very clever," I said to myself, "but he is certainly very conceited." ========== Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The) (Brandon Sanderson) - Highlight Loc. 10684 | Added on Monday, 4 May 15 06:48:11 Greenwich Mean Time only path ========== Turning Pro (Steven Pressfield) - Highlight Loc. 560-61 | Added on Saturday, 15 August 15 19:31:08 Greenwich Mean Time The amateur prizes shallowness and shuns depth. The culture of Twitter and Facebook is paradise for the amateur. ========== Turning Pro (Steven Pressfield) - Highlight Loc. 579 | Added on Saturday, 15 August 15 19:34:37 Greenwich Mean Time The amateur sits on a stool, like Lana Turner at Schwab’s, waiting to be discovered. ========== Turning Pro (Steven Pressfield) - Highlight Loc. 1022-25 | Added on Saturday, 15 August 15 21:41:00 Greenwich Mean Time Our work is a practice. One bad day is nothing to us. Ten bad days are nothing. In the scheme of our lifelong practice, twenty-four hours when we can’t gain yardage is only a speed bump. We’ll forget it by breakfast tomorrow and be back again, ready to hurl our bodies into the fray. ========== Turning Pro (Steven Pressfield) - Highlight Loc. 1031-32 | Added on Saturday, 15 August 15 21:42:37 Greenwich Mean Time Athletes play hurt. Warriors fight scared. The professional takes two aspirin and keeps on truckin’. ========== So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (Cal Newport) - Highlight Loc. 252 | Added on Monday, 17 August 15 04:21:47 Greenwich Mean Time Compelling careers often have complex origins that reject the simple idea that all you have to do is follow your passion. ========== So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (Cal Newport) - Highlight Loc. 352-53 | Added on Monday, 17 August 15 04:44:19 Greenwich Mean Time The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it. ========== So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (Cal Newport) - Highlight Loc. 355 | Added on Monday, 17 August 15 04:46:01 Greenwich Mean Time Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. ========== So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (Cal Newport) - Bookmark Loc. 483 | Added on Monday, 17 August 15 10:57:05 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Breaking Out and Making Big: A No-nonsense Book on Start-Ups and Entreprenurship (Rudrajeet Desai) - Highlight Loc. 2669-70 | Added on Monday, 21 December 15 12:12:15 Greenwich Mean Time If we can isolate every task and focus on it completely for as much time as we get, the quality of the work will always be better. ========== Breaking Out and Making Big: A No-nonsense Book on Start-Ups and Entreprenurship (Rudrajeet Desai) - Highlight Loc. 2732-33 | Added on Monday, 21 December 15 12:34:11 Greenwich Mean Time ■ Efficiency and quality are best maintained when we do something small and focus completely on it while we are doing it. At the same time, we should forget about completing the larger project, keeping in mind only the delivery of that one task. ========== Breaking Out and Making Big: A No-nonsense Book on Start-Ups and Entreprenurship (Rudrajeet Desai) - Highlight Loc. 3532-33 | Added on Wednesday, 23 December 15 11:32:17 Greenwich Mean Time You can go wrong when you take incorrect decisions, but you can’t go wrong when you don’t take any decision at all. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 147 | Added on Wednesday, 23 December 15 19:55:44 Greenwich Mean Time the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 562-63 | Added on Thursday, 24 December 15 12:11:21 Greenwich Mean Time It’s not just repeated physical actions that can rewire our brains. Purely mental activity can also alter our neural circuitry, sometimes in far-reaching ways. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 590-93 | Added on Thursday, 24 December 15 12:17:59 Greenwich Mean Time As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of a physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit. The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes Doidge, is that, for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into “rigid behaviors.”33 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 601-3 | Added on Thursday, 24 December 15 12:20:16 Greenwich Mean Time neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 609-14 | Added on Thursday, 24 December 15 12:24:19 Greenwich Mean Time “If we stop exercising our mental skills,” writes Doidge, “we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead.”36 Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s medical school, terms this process “survival of the busiest.”37 The mental skills we sacrifice may be as valuable, or even more valuable, than the ones we gain. When it comes to the quality of our thought, our neurons and synapses are entirely indifferent. The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 653-56 | Added on Thursday, 24 December 15 12:32:16 Greenwich Mean Time I began to worry that my use of the Internet might be changing the way my brain was processing information. I resisted the idea at first. It seemed ludicrous to think that fiddling with a computer, a mere tool, could alter in any deep or lasting way what was going on inside my head. But I was wrong. As neuroscientists have discovered, the brain—and the mind to which it gives rise—is forever a work in progress. That’s true not just for each of us as individuals. It’s true for all of us as a species. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 947-49 | Added on Thursday, 24 December 15 22:02:10 Greenwich Mean Time The oral world of our distant ancestors may well have had emotional and intuitive depths that we can no longer appreciate. McLuhan believed that preliterate peoples must have enjoyed a particularly intense “sensuous involvement” with the world. When we learned to read, he argued, we suffered a “considerable detachment from the feelings or emotional involvement that a nonliterate man or society would experience.” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 1076-80 | Added on Friday, 25 December 15 10:37:08 Greenwich Mean Time whenever he read to himself, “as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”12 Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 1274-75 | Added on Friday, 25 December 15 14:45:56 Greenwich Mean Time Einstein’s Relativity, Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3962-63 | Added on Sunday, 27 December 15 10:34:41 Greenwich Mean Time “Writing in the Age of Distraction,” Locus, January 2009. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 1613-14 | Added on Sunday, 27 December 15 11:00:41 Greenwich Mean Time predominant sound in the modern library is the tapping of keys, not the turning of pages. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 1762-64 | Added on Sunday, 27 December 15 16:59:32 Greenwich Mean Time They will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the essayist Caleb Crain describes as “groupiness,” where people read mainly “for the sake of a feeling of belonging” rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement.17 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 1774-76 | Added on Sunday, 27 December 15 17:03:21 Greenwich Mean Time A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.19 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 1860-61 | Added on Sunday, 27 December 15 18:57:08 Greenwich Mean Time The distractions in our lives have been proliferating for a long time, but never has there been a medium that, like the Net, has been programmed to so widely scatter our attention and to do it so insistently. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2008-11 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 05:34:25 Greenwich Mean Time It is the very fact that book reading “understimulates the senses” that makes the activity so intellectually rewarding. By allowing us to filter out distractions, to quiet the problem-solving functions of the frontal lobes, deep reading becomes a form of deep thinking. The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2011 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 05:34:49 Greenwich Mean Time When it comes to the firing of our neurons, it’s a mistake to assume that more is better. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2091-92 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 11:53:06 Greenwich Mean Time The readers’ attention “was directed toward the machinery of the hypertext and its functions rather than to the experience offered by the story.” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2185-91 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 12:37:15 Greenwich Mean Time It’s important to emphasize that the Net’s ability to monitor events and automatically send out messages and notifications is one of its great strengths as a communication technology. We rely on that capability to personalize the workings of the system, to program the vast database to respond to our particular needs, interests, and desires. We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated. The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to “vastly overvalue what happens to us right now,” as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that “the new is more often trivial than essential.”33 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Note Loc. 2207 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 12:42:44 Greenwich Mean Time open ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2223-24 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 12:46:56 Greenwich Mean Time “How do users read on the web?” he asked then. His succinct answer: “They don’t.”38 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2269-71 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 12:54:26 Greenwich Mean Time we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2311 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 13:07:40 Greenwich Mean Time “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2346-48 | Added on Monday, 28 December 15 13:13:11 Greenwich Mean Time What the Net diminishes is Johnson’s primary kind of knowledge: the ability to know, in depth, a subject for ourselves, to construct within our own minds the rich and idiosyncratic set of connections that give rise to a singular intelligence. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2715 | Added on Tuesday, 29 December 15 10:15:32 Greenwich Mean Time The strip-mining of “relevant content” replaces the slow excavation of meaning. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2744-45 | Added on Tuesday, 29 December 15 10:24:11 Greenwich Mean Time We need to work in Google’s “world of numbers,” but we also need to be able to retreat to Sleepy Hollow. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2786-88 | Added on Tuesday, 29 December 15 10:34:08 Greenwich Mean Time Today, more information is “available to us than ever before,” writes Levy, “but there is less time to make use of it—and specifically to make use of it with any depth of reflection.”49 Tomorrow, the situation will be worse still. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2868-71 | Added on Tuesday, 29 December 15 10:50:27 Greenwich Mean Time they’re trying to duplicate, in the circuitry of a computer, the electrical signals that buzz among the brain’s billions of neurons, in the belief that intelligence will then “emerge” from the machine as the mind emerges from the physical brain. If you can get the “overall computation” right, as Page said, then the algorithms of intelligence will write themselves. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 2951-52 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 09:52:46 Greenwich Mean Time He suggests that “by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely ‘human’ tasks like brain-storming and daydreaming.” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3028-30 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:09:01 Greenwich Mean Time When the memory was allowed to fade—by discontinuing the repetition of the experience—the number of synapses eventually dropped to about fifteen hundred. The fact that, even after a memory is forgotten, the number of synapses remains a bit higher than it had been originally helps explain why it’s easier to learn something a second time. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3105-9 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:37:55 Greenwich Mean Time As the psychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains in his book The Developing Mind, “Though filled with a combination of seemingly random activations, aspects of the day’s experiences, and elements from the distant past, dreams may be a fundamental way in which the mind consolidates the myriad of explicit recollections into a coherent set of representations for permanent, consolidated memory.”26 When our sleep suffers, studies show, so, too, does our memory.27 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3137-40 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:44:29 Greenwich Mean Time “Unlike a computer,” writes Nelson Cowan, an expert on memory who teaches at the University of Missouri, “the normal human brain never reaches a point at which experiences can no longer be committed to memory; the brain cannot be full.”31 Says Torkel Klingberg, “The amount of information that can be stored in long-term memory is virtually boundless.” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3145-47 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:46:18 Greenwich Mean Time when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3155-57 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:47:54 Greenwich Mean Time The Web has a very different effect. It places more pressure on our working memory, not only diverting resources from our higher reasoning faculties but obstructing the consolidation of long-term memories and the development of schemas. The calculator, a powerful but highly specialized tool, turned out to be an aid to memory. The Web is a technology of forgetfulness. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3174-76 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:52:49 Greenwich Mean Time thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3182 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:54:11 Greenwich Mean Time “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3191-92 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:55:45 Greenwich Mean Time Of all the sacrifices we make when we devote ourselves to the Internet as our universal medium, the greatest is likely to be the wealth of connections within our own minds. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3196-98 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 10:56:59 Greenwich Mean Time Web’s connections are not our connections—and no matter how many hours we spend searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3366-72 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 11:50:50 Greenwich Mean Time What makes us most human, Weizenbaum had come to believe, is what is least computable about us—the connections between our mind and our body, the experiences that shape our memory and our thinking, our capacity for emotion and empathy. The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers—as we come to experience more of our lives through the disembodied symbols flickering across our screens—is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. The only way to avoid that fate, Weizenbaum wrote, is to have the self-awareness and the courage to refuse to delegate to computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual pursuits, particularly “tasks that demand wisdom.”14 ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3452-54 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 12:05:34 Greenwich Mean Time McLuhan’s point was that an honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what’s lost as well as what’s gained. We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self. ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3552-53 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 12:25:20 Greenwich Mean Time software can end up turning the most intimate and personal of human activities into mindless “rituals” whose steps are “encoded in the logic of web pages.” ========== The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (Nicholas Carr) - Highlight Loc. 3594-95 | Added on Wednesday, 30 December 15 12:33:15 Greenwich Mean Time It would not be rash to suggest that as the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts. ========== Bad Habits No More: 25 Steps to Break Any Bad Habit (S.J. Scott and Steve Scott) - Highlight Loc. 214-15 | Added on Sunday, 3 January 16 12:00:49 Greenwich Mean Time “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” ========== Bad Habits No More: 25 Steps to Break Any Bad Habit (S.J. Scott and Steve Scott) - Highlight Loc. 524-25 | Added on Sunday, 3 January 16 12:38:46 Greenwich Mean Time The interesting thing about bad habits is they often come from a desire to receive a subconscious reward. ========== Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century (Sean Patrick) - Highlight Loc. 149-53 | Added on Monday, 4 January 16 20:03:04 Greenwich Mean Time Well, as the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. And that’s what the nature of genius is ultimately about. It’s about how we can empower ourselves to bring true meaning to our lives and the lives of others in ways most people would consider impossible. It’s about rising above a life of, as Thoreau said, “quiet desperation” that ends with our songs still in our hearts, and experience the rapture of truly living. It’s about saying yes to our adventures. ========== Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century (Sean Patrick) - Highlight Loc. 185-88 | Added on Monday, 4 January 16 20:12:59 Greenwich Mean Time The philosopher Edmund Burke said “there is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.” Imagination is the life force of the genius code. This force amplifies and colors every other piece of the code, and unlocks our potential for understanding and ability. It’s no coincidence that geniuses not only dare to dream of the impossible for their work, but do the same for their lives. They’re audacious enough to think that they’re not just an ordinary player. ========== Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century (Sean Patrick) - Highlight Loc. 211-12 | Added on Monday, 4 January 16 20:17:47 Greenwich Mean Time In every field of human endeavor, the more visionary the work, the less likely it is to be quickly understood and embraced by lesser minds. ========== Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century (Sean Patrick) - Highlight Loc. 449-54 | Added on Monday, 4 January 16 20:55:05 Greenwich Mean Time The New York Herald Tribune ran a story on October 15, 1911 called “Tesla’s New Monarch of Machines.” In it, Tesla proclaimed that he was working on a flying machine that “will have neither wings or propellers” or any on-board source of fuel, and that would resemble a gas stove in shape. Using the gyroscopic action of an engine that Tesla had built, and assisted by devices that he was “not prepared to talk about,” the machine would be able to “move through the air in any direction with perfect safety, higher speeds than have yet been reached, regardless of weather and oblivious of ‘holes’ in the air.” Further, it would be able to “remain absolutely stationary in the air, even in a wind, for great length of time.” ========== Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century (Sean Patrick) - Highlight Loc. 549-50 | Added on Monday, 4 January 16 21:08:02 Greenwich Mean Time It takes curiosity to find your call to adventure, it takes courage to venture into the unknown, and it takes imagination to create your path. ========== “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard Phillips Feynman, Edward Hutchings and Ralph Leighton) - Highlight Loc. 1972 | Added on Tuesday, 19 January 16 13:19:56 Greenwich Mean Time you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. ========== “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character (Richard Phillips Feynman, Edward Hutchings and Ralph Leighton) - Highlight Loc. 4887-88 | Added on Tuesday, 26 January 16 07:40:58 Greenwich Mean Time the difference between a man with a uniform on, and with the uniform off—it’s the same man). ========== The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy) - Highlight Loc. 580-81 | Added on Friday, 5 February 16 16:34:30 Greenwich Mean Time The suggestions of others in themselves have absolutely no power whatever over you except the power that you give them through your own thoughts. ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 82-84 | Added on Monday, 15 February 16 20:37:57 Greenwich Mean Time One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different-appropriate-speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. ========== Self Confidence - 52 Proven Ways To Gain Self Confidence, Boost Your Self Esteem and End Self Doubt (Andy C. E. Brown) - Highlight Loc. 471-72 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 16 04:01:34 Greenwich Mean Time Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. - Christopher Robin ========== The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy) - Highlight Loc. 3026-32 | Added on Tuesday, 15 March 16 19:33:05 Greenwich Mean Time Life Always Forgives You Life forgives you when you cut your finger. The subconscious intelligence within you sets about immediately to repair it. New cells build bridges over the cut. Should you take some tainted food by error, Life forgives you and causes you to regurgitate it in order to preserve you. If you burn your hand, the Life Principle reduces the edema and congestion, and gives you new skin, tissue, and cells. Life holds no grudges against you, and it is always forgiving you. Life brings you back to health, vitality, harmony, and peace, if you cooperate by thinking in harmony with nature. Negative, hurtful memories, bitterness, and ill will clutter up and impede the free flow of the Life Principle in you. ========== The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy) - Highlight Loc. 3269-71 | Added on Wednesday, 16 March 16 10:20:57 Greenwich Mean Time when you really have an intense desire to over come any block in your life, and you come to a clear-cut decision that there is a way out, and that is the course you wish to follow, then victory and triumph are assured. ========== The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (Joseph Murphy) - Highlight Loc. 3589-90 | Added on Friday, 18 March 16 12:20:43 Greenwich Mean Time These same physicians stated that it is the fear of time, not time itself, that has a harmful aging effect on our minds and bodies, and that the neurotic fear of the effects of time may well be the cause of premature aging. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 419-20 | Added on Thursday, 28 April 16 19:30:17 Greenwich Mean Time One of the tasks of System 2 is to overcome the impulses of System 1. In other words, System 2 is in charge of self-control. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 646-47 | Added on Tuesday, 10 May 16 20:39:33 Greenwich Mean Time frequent switching of tasks and speeded-up mental work are not intrinsically pleasurable, and that people avoid them when possible. This is how the law of least effort comes to be a law. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 659-60 | Added on Tuesday, 10 May 16 20:42:40 Greenwich Mean Time both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 670 | Added on Tuesday, 10 May 16 20:44:51 Greenwich Mean Time controlling thoughts and behaviors is one of the tasks that System 2 performs. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 694 | Added on Tuesday, 10 May 16 20:50:09 Greenwich Mean Time Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. ========== My Life and Work (Henry Ford) - Highlight Loc. 28-32 | Added on Friday, 22 July 16 18:34:24 Greenwich Mean Time Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization. Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas. An idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea. Almost any one can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product. ========== My Life and Work (Henry Ford) - Highlight Loc. 76-78 | Added on Friday, 22 July 16 18:48:53 Greenwich Mean Time Lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised "the good old times"—which usually means the bad old abuses—and because they are perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as "practical men." Their return to power is often hailed as the return of common sense. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight Loc. 88-89 | Added on Sunday, 6 November 16 10:56:34 Greenwich Mean Time it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight Loc. 93-94 | Added on Sunday, 6 November 16 10:57:24 Greenwich Mean Time We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 230-32 | Added on Sunday, 6 November 16 20:10:36 Greenwich Mean Time the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 276-77 | Added on Tuesday, 8 November 16 06:55:37 Greenwich Mean Time The brain started off with just three rooms, or clumps of neurons: a hindbrain (connected to the spinal column), a midbrain, and a forebrain (connected to the sensory organs at the front of the animal). ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 334-35 | Added on Tuesday, 8 November 16 19:38:29 Greenwich Mean Time Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 465-68 | Added on Tuesday, 8 November 16 20:24:51 Greenwich Mean Time Automatic and controlled processes end up working at cross purposes, firing each other up to ever greater exertions. But because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears. Thus, the attempt to remove an unpleasant thought can guarantee it a place on your frequent-play list of mental ruminations. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 473-74 | Added on Tuesday, 8 November 16 20:26:20 Greenwich Mean Time Automatic processes generate thousands of thoughts and images every day, often through random association. The ones that get stuck are the ones that particularly shock us, the ones we try to suppress or deny. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 22 | Loc. 504-5 | Added on Tuesday, 8 November 16 20:30:43 Greenwich Mean Time Our minds are loose confederations of parts, but we identify with and pay too much attention to one part: conscious verbal thinking. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 28 | Loc. 612-14 | Added on Wednesday, 9 November 16 17:42:21 Greenwich Mean Time The unsettling implication of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 36 | Loc. 767-70 | Added on Wednesday, 9 November 16 18:12:09 Greenwich Mean Time For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 38 | Loc. 800-804 | Added on Wednesday, 9 November 16 18:19:55 Greenwich Mean Time Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts. A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking. Over many weeks, the client’s thoughts become more realistic, the feedback loop is broken, and the client’s anxiety or depression abates. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Bookmark on Page 39 | Loc. 812 | Added on Wednesday, 9 November 16 18:23:29 Greenwich Mean Time ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 4576-77 | Added on Wednesday, 9 November 16 18:36:17 Greenwich Mean Time Feeling Good by David Burns, 1999. Just reading this book has been shown to be an effective treatment for depression ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 904-6 | Added on Wednesday, 9 November 16 18:57:39 Greenwich Mean Time You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 52 | Loc. 1054-56 | Added on Thursday, 10 November 16 09:33:54 Greenwich Mean Time Woody Allen once described his brain as his “second favorite organ,” but for all of us it’s by far the most expensive one to run. It accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 20 percent of our energy. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 57 | Loc. 1148-53 | Added on Thursday, 10 November 16 09:53:34 Greenwich Mean Time relationships grow best by balanced give and take, especially of gifts, favors, attention, and self-disclosure. The first three are somewhat obvious, but people often don’t realize the degree to which the disclosure of personal information is a gambit in the dating game. When someone tells you about past romantic relationships, there is conversational pressure for you to do the same. If this disclosure card is played too early, you might feel ambivalence—your reciprocity reflex makes you prepare your own matching disclosure, but some other part of you resists sharing intimate details with a near-stranger. But when it’s played at the right time, the past-relationships-mutual-disclosure conversation can be a memorable turning point on the road to love. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1203-5 | Added on Thursday, 10 November 16 20:21:34 Greenwich Mean Time Each player then reacts to what the other player did in the previous round. In real life, however, you don’t react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1302-3 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 06:07:42 Greenwich Mean Time To win at this game you must present your best possible self to others. You must appear virtuous, whether or not you are, and you must gain the benefits of cooperation whether or not you deserve them. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 1305-6 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 06:10:16 Greenwich Mean Time Social life is therefore always a game of social comparison. We must compare ourselves to other people, and our actions to their actions, and we must somehow spin those comparisons in our favor. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1380 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 06:25:32 Greenwich Mean Time people really are open to information that will predict the behavior of others, but they refuse to adjust their self-assessments. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 75 | Loc. 1477-78 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 06:53:16 Greenwich Mean Time Outside of children’s cartoons and horror films, people almost never hurt others for the sheer joy of hurting someone. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1525-26 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 07:01:29 Greenwich Mean Time The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1533-34 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 07:02:35 Greenwich Mean Time Feeling Good, 36 a popular guide to cognitive therapy, ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1621 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 10:19:34 Greenwich Mean Time “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.” ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1691-92 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 11:03:50 Greenwich Mean Time A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1701-2 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 11:07:29 Greenwich Mean Time Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier. (Women experience more depression, but also more intense joy). ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1765-67 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 12:22:35 Greenwich Mean Time H = S + C + V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1803-5 | Added on Friday, 11 November 16 12:32:16 Greenwich Mean Time changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1861 | Added on Saturday, 12 November 16 20:22:48 Greenwich Mean Time Pleasures should be both savored and varied. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1911-16 | Added on Saturday, 12 November 16 20:36:31 Greenwich Mean Time People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward ever larger houses and ever longer commutes. People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations, even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run wealthier, if they bought basic, functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans in particular spend almost everything they have—and sometimes more—on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2216-18 | Added on Monday, 14 November 16 20:24:15 Greenwich Mean Time Children following this pattern, called “secure” attachment, reduce or stop their play when their mothers leave, and then show anxiety, which the stranger cannot fully relieve. In the two scenes where mom returns, these children show delight, often moving toward her or touching her to reestablish contact with their secure base; but then they quickly settle down and return to play. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2225-28 | Added on Monday, 14 November 16 20:27:13 Greenwich Mean Time She observed mothers at home and found that those who were warm and highly responsive to their children were most likely to have children who showed secure attachment in the strange situation. These children had learned that they could count on their mothers, and were therefore the most bold and confident. Mothers who were aloof and unresponsive were more likely to have avoidant children, who had learned not to expect much help and comfort from mom. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 2284-87 | Added on Monday, 14 November 16 20:40:36 Greenwich Mean Time Evidence that romantic partners become true attachment figures, like parents, comes from a review 25 of research on how people cope with the death of a spouse, or a long separation. The review found that adults experience the same sequence Bowlby had observed in children placed in hospitals: initial anxiety and panic, followed by lethargy and depression, followed by recovery through emotional detachment. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 2352-54 | Added on Monday, 14 November 16 20:56:47 Greenwich Mean Time a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 2564-65 | Added on Thursday, 24 November 16 14:55:50 Greenwich Mean Time What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2636 | Added on Sunday, 27 November 16 20:29:14 Greenwich Mean Time “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2750-52 | Added on Monday, 19 December 16 19:42:12 Greenwich Mean Time people who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of “vertical coherence” among their goals—that is, higher-level (long term) goals and lower-level (immediate) goals all fit together well so that pursuing one’s short-term goals advances the pursuit of long-term goals. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2788-89 | Added on Monday, 19 December 16 19:50:48 Greenwich Mean Time Pennebaker’s Opening Up. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2899-2900 | Added on Monday, 19 December 16 20:06:54 Greenwich Mean Time Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2914-16 | Added on Monday, 19 December 16 20:09:49 Greenwich Mean Time For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD). ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 254-56 | Added on Thursday, 29 December 16 18:55:01 Greenwich Mean Time To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth. ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 608-9 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 03:56:57 Greenwich Mean Time In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away. ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 619-22 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 03:59:51 Greenwich Mean Time Most of us were taught to pay attention to the things we did not understand. We were told to go to a dictionary when we met an unfamiliar word. We were told to go to an encyclopedia or some other reference work when we were confronted with allusions or statements we did not comprehend. We were told to consult footnotes, scholarly commentaries, or other secondary sources to get help. But when these things are done prematurely, they only impede our reading, instead of helping it. ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 646-47 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 04:04:13 Greenwich Mean Time A good speed reading course should therefore teach you to read at many different speeds, not just one speed that is faster than anything you can manage now. It should enable you to vary your rate of reading in accordance with the nature and complexity of the material. ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 667-70 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 04:10:20 Greenwich Mean Time The mind, that astounding instrument, can grasp a sentence or even a paragraph at a "glance" -if only the eyes will provide it with the information it needs. Thus the primary task-recognized as such by all speed reading courses-is to correct the fixations and regressions that slow so many readers down. Fortunately, this can be done quite easily. Once it is done, the student can read as fast as his mind will let him, not as slow as his eyes make him. ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 745-46 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 18:13:21 Greenwich Mean Time 1. WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT AS A WHOLE? ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 750 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 18:13:33 Greenwich Mean Time 2. WHAT IS BEING SAID IN DETAIL, AND HOW? ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 751 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 18:13:42 Greenwich Mean Time 3. Is THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR PART? ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 753 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 18:13:53 Greenwich Mean Time 4. WHAT OF IT? ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 784-85 | Added on Wednesday, 4 January 17 18:29:24 Greenwich Mean Time The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 3078-80 | Added on Friday, 20 January 17 12:28:26 Greenwich Mean Time two philosophical approaches have made enormous contributions to legal and political theory and practice; indeed, they helped create societies that respect individual rights (Kant) while still working efficiently for the good of the people (Bentham). ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 3116-18 | Added on Friday, 20 January 17 17:45:34 Greenwich Mean Time it is wrong to take the life of a sentient being that has some sense of identity and attachments, therefore killing animals with large brains and highly developed social lives (such as other primates and most other mammals) is wrong, even if they could be raised in an environment they enjoyed and were then killed painlessly. ========== Sherlock Holmes. Illustrated (Arthur Conan Sir Doyle) - Bookmark Loc. 472 | Added on Wednesday, 8 February 17 13:00:53 Greenwich Mean Time ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 252 | Added on Friday, 31 March 17 09:34:13 Greenwich Mean Time Difference ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 252 | Added on Friday, 31 March 17 09:34:28 Greenwich Mean Time Difference ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 252 | Added on Friday, 31 March 17 09:34:48 Greenwich Mean Time Difference ========== How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Charles Van Doren Mortimer J. Adler) - Highlight Loc. 252 | Added on Friday, 31 March 17 09:37:11 Greenwich Mean Time Difference ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 214-15 | Added on Sunday, 9 April 17 13:33:18 Greenwich Mean Time This is a world inhabited not by people who have to be persuaded to believe but by people who want an excuse to believe. ========== Let the Right One In (John Avjide Lindquist) - Highlight Loc. 27-29 | Added on Wednesday, 12 April 17 21:33:59 Greenwich Mean Time You were beyond the grasp of the mysteries of the past; there wasn't even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church. That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror. ========== Let the Right One In (John Avjide Lindquist) - Highlight Loc. 229-30 | Added on Wednesday, 12 April 17 22:06:46 Greenwich Mean Time The bulk of his collection was made up of the two bags of books he had bought for two hundred kronor through an ad in the paper. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 27-28 | Added on Tuesday, 18 April 17 10:06:45 Greenwich Mean Time (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!) ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 43-46 | Added on Tuesday, 18 April 17 10:15:59 Greenwich Mean Time It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 74-75 | Added on Tuesday, 18 April 17 10:30:01 Greenwich Mean Time The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 122 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 19:41:10 Greenwich Mean Time L'HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 130-34 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 19:46:47 Greenwich Mean Time For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 166-67 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 20:02:24 Greenwich Mean Time "Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh. "Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Note Loc. 169 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 20:04:41 Greenwich Mean Time enjoyment in moaning ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 170-71 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 20:05:39 Greenwich Mean Time Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Bookmark Loc. 177 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 20:27:45 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 190-91 | Added on Saturday, 6 May 17 22:44:36 Greenwich Mean Time Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 266-67 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:09:50 Greenwich Mean Time I have a friend for instance ... Ech! gentlemen, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one to whom he is not a friend! ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 274 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:16:46 Greenwich Mean Time there is a most advantageous advantage ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 285-86 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:20:34 Greenwich Mean Time But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 290-92 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:22:21 Greenwich Mean Time And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 293-95 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:23:32 Greenwich Mean Time In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 304 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:33:00 Greenwich Mean Time everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 317-18 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 11:46:06 Greenwich Mean Time "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 324-25 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 12:04:39 Greenwich Mean Time What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 369-70 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 12:32:03 Greenwich Mean Time lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 388-90 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 12:49:12 Greenwich Mean Time even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 420-22 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 22:16:59 Greenwich Mean Time And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 429-30 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 22:19:03 Greenwich Mean Time I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 458-59 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 22:29:06 Greenwich Mean Time We are discussing things seriously; but if you won't deign to give me your attention, I will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 473-74 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 22:33:32 Greenwich Mean Time I swear to you, gentlemen, there is not one thing, not one word of what I have written that I really believe. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time I feel and suspect that I am lying like a cobbler. ========== Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) - Highlight Loc. 486-87 | Added on Sunday, 7 May 17 22:37:57 Greenwich Mean Time Of course I have myself made up all the things you say. That, too, is from underground. I have been for forty years listening to you through a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself, there was nothing else I could invent. ========== The Theory Of Investment Value (J B Williams) - Highlight Loc. 482-83 | Added on Sunday, 4 June 17 19:36:52 Greenwich Mean Time Naturally, orders move first, business volumes next, and interest rates last. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 160-61 | Added on Friday, 7 July 17 16:14:45 Greenwich Mean Time Was it really true, I asked, that all this business of chaos and complexity is based on two simple ideas – the sensitivity of a system to its starting conditions, and feedback? Yes, he replied, that’s all there is to it. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 203-5 | Added on Friday, 7 July 17 16:30:14 Greenwich Mean Time It was Galileo, more than anyone, who laid down the principles of the scientific method of investigation, involving comparing theories (or models) with the outcome of experiment and observation, and it was Galileo who first got to grips with motion in a scientific way. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 410-11 | Added on Friday, 7 July 17 17:17:28 Greenwich Mean Time There is no arrow of time in Newton’s laws, and they seemed, to Laplace and many others, to describe a completely deterministic world in which both past and future are rigidly fixed and there is no scope for free will. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 557-58 | Added on Friday, 7 July 17 18:00:53 Greenwich Mean Time Since we know that in the real world disorder increases in any closed system (things wear out) as time passes, the inevitable increase in entropy defines a direction of time, an arrow pointing from the ordered past into the disordered future. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 1125-27 | Added on Saturday, 8 July 17 10:21:45 Greenwich Mean Time But in essence we have already found the underlying simplicity from which chaos and complexity emerge – simple laws, non-linearity, sensitivity to initial conditions and feedback are what make the world tick. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 1510-12 | Added on Sunday, 9 July 17 07:50:56 Greenwich Mean Time The Peano curve is infinitely long, but it is contained within a finite area. There is a clear analogy here with the ‘space filling’ curve that is the attractor, wrapped around the torus in the phase space that describes a turbulent system, although none of that was known in the 1890s. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 1615-16 | Added on Sunday, 9 July 17 15:32:38 Greenwich Mean Time It is randomness plus a simple iterative rule (or rules) that makes the complexity of the world. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 1790-93 | Added on Sunday, 9 July 17 16:10:53 Greenwich Mean Time But although the mass increases as a power law with exponent 3, the metabolic rate scales in line with a power law with exponent 2.25. In this respect, the animals are behaving as if their size does not scale like a three-dimensional volume, but like something intermediate between a volume and a two-dimensional surface – specifically, like an extremely crumpled up, fractal surface. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 1824-25 | Added on Monday, 10 July 17 14:20:39 Greenwich Mean Time It is in closed systems that we encounter time reversibility and Poincaré recurrences; in open systems we encounter irreversibility and an arrow of time. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 1985-86 | Added on Sunday, 16 July 17 18:51:47 Greenwich Mean Time Ultimately, it is gravity that tells the arrow of time which way to point. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 2592-93 | Added on Saturday, 29 July 17 17:48:44 Greenwich Mean Time large events (in this case, things like stock market crashes, such as the crash of October 1987) can happen out of the blue, as a consequence of small triggers. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 4739-40 | Added on Saturday, 29 July 17 17:49:02 Greenwich Mean Time Mitchell Waldrop’s book Complexity, or Mark Buchanan’s Ubiquity. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 2653-54 | Added on Saturday, 29 July 17 18:02:26 Greenwich Mean Time The point is that any single event might be a special case, and doesn’t on its own tell you anything much about the underlying cause of similar events, or likelihood of their recurrence, ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 2882-83 | Added on Friday, 4 August 17 12:19:23 Greenwich Mean Time ‘life crystallizes at a critical molecular diversity because catalytic closure itself crystallizes’. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 2964-65 | Added on Friday, 4 August 17 12:35:25 Greenwich Mean Time The number of cell types does increase as the square root of the number of genes! ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 280-81 | Added on Sunday, 6 August 17 13:04:10 Greenwich Mean Time Ultimately, he rejected all games of chance. ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 492-94 | Added on Sunday, 6 August 17 13:56:37 Greenwich Mean Time At first, Bobby was somewhat of a slow player, and the chess players in the park were just the opposite. Nigro felt they wouldn’t tolerate Bobby’s sometimes languorous tempo, so he’d be forced to quicken his play and therefore his thinking. ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 516-17 | Added on Sunday, 6 August 17 14:00:58 Greenwich Mean Time The boy—and then the man—had one salient cognitive goal, although he didn’t express it openly: He wanted to understand. ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 2098-99 | Added on Tuesday, 8 August 17 09:30:42 Greenwich Mean Time Whether or not Bobby was hypersensitive, he did suffer from hyperacusis—an acute senstivity to noise and even distant sounds—and it was clear that Tal, in particular, knew just how to rattle him. ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 3016 | Added on Wednesday, 9 August 17 05:48:13 Greenwich Mean Time Taking nothing for granted was one of the keys to Fischer’s success. ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 3925-26 | Added on Thursday, 10 August 17 04:28:03 Greenwich Mean Time “Bobby fears the unknown, whatever lies beyond his control. He tries to eliminate any element of chance from his life and his chess.” ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 4058-59 | Added on Thursday, 10 August 17 04:52:42 Greenwich Mean Time Also preying on his mind were his failure to find romantic love, and his constant religious doubts. This cumulative sadness contributed to his not wanting to be with people … unless he felt highly secure and comfortable with ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 5421-23 | Added on Thursday, 10 August 17 16:15:14 Greenwich Mean Time Bobby told no one, not even his closest friends, about Krua Thai, since, although he was lonely, he often preferred to dine alone; like Thomas Jefferson in the White House, he enjoyed his own company, the opportunity to read or to contemplate books, ideas, and memories. Paradoxically, it was when he was with others that he felt an uncomfortable solitude. ========== Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness (Frank Brady) - Highlight Loc. 5627-28 | Added on Thursday, 10 August 17 16:41:19 Greenwich Mean Time “Never obey anyone’s command unless it is coming from within you.” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance) - Highlight Loc. 142-43 | Added on Friday, 11 August 17 05:44:29 Greenwich Mean Time “I think there are probably too many smart people pursuing Internet stuff, finance, and law,” Musk said on the way. “That is part of the reason why we haven’t seen as much innovation.” ========== Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance) - Highlight Loc. 243-44 | Added on Friday, 11 August 17 11:14:10 Greenwich Mean Time Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to . . . well . . . save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 528-31 | Added on Friday, 11 August 17 13:16:42 Greenwich Mean Time “Because you acted like a finocchio. You gave her more than the court said. You didn’t hit the other in the face because she was making a picture. You let women dictate your actions and they are not competent in this world, though certainly they will be saints in heaven while we men burn in hell. And then I’ve watched you all these years.” ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 539-40 | Added on Friday, 11 August 17 13:18:17 Greenwich Mean Time “Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me to help. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 887-88 | Added on Friday, 11 August 17 17:09:54 Greenwich Mean Time Hagen had learned the art of negotiation from the Don himself. “Never get angry,” the Don had instructed. “Never make a threat. Reason with people.” ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 1217 | Added on Saturday, 12 August 17 05:58:08 Greenwich Mean Time “Santino, never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking. Never let them know what you have under your fingernails. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 2544 | Added on Sunday, 13 August 17 11:32:52 Greenwich Mean Time Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 3862-63 | Added on Monday, 14 August 17 17:10:31 Greenwich Mean Time The Don considered a use of threats the most foolish kind of exposure; the unleashing of anger without forethought as the most dangerous indulgence. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 4453 | Added on Tuesday, 15 August 17 07:15:25 Greenwich Mean Time time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 5151 | Added on Tuesday, 15 August 17 19:31:27 Greenwich Mean Time Women and children can afford to be careless, men cannot. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 6865-67 | Added on Wednesday, 16 August 17 17:10:26 Greenwich Mean Time It was a pattern he was to see often, the Don helping those in misfortune whose misfortune he had partly created. Not perhaps out of cunning or planning but because of his variety of interests or perhaps because of the nature of the universe, the interlinking of good and evil, natural of itself. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 7103-5 | Added on Wednesday, 16 August 17 17:45:56 Greenwich Mean Time “You cannot say ‘no’ to the people you love, not often. That’s the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a ‘yes.’ Or you have to make them say ‘no.’ You have to take time and trouble. ========== The Godfather (Mario Puzo, Peter Bart and Robert Thompson) - Highlight Loc. 7110 | Added on Wednesday, 16 August 17 17:46:46 Greenwich Mean Time “Revenge is a dish that tastes best when it is cold,” ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 621-23 | Added on Wednesday, 30 August 17 12:01:00 Greenwich Mean Time “If I live X number of years, I’ll go through X number of recessions. But if I spent all my time guessing cycles, Berkshire Hathaway would be $15/share. You can’t dance in and out of businesses based on forecasts.” ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 655-58 | Added on Wednesday, 30 August 17 12:05:53 Greenwich Mean Time Munger went on to say that biographies give you marvelous experience, extend your range and may even improve the quality of your friends. He noted that Golden Arches and The Big Store offer great lessons on business. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 765-66 | Added on Wednesday, 30 August 17 12:20:28 Greenwich Mean Time there have been two basic themes in value investing: 1) buy assets and 2) buy earnings power. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 1141-42 | Added on Thursday, 31 August 17 09:59:00 Greenwich Mean Time Buffett gave two criteria for evaluating the performance of management: 1) How well do they run the business? and 2) How well do they treat the owners? ========== The Sicilian (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 3415 | Added on Friday, 1 September 17 19:31:01 Greenwich Mean Time men change with time or under torture. So it’s best they do not know.” ========== The Sicilian (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 3591-92 | Added on Friday, 1 September 17 20:03:15 Greenwich Mean Time It was the Don’s greatest strength that he never took notice of an insulting tone, a lack of respect, though he stored it away in his heart. ========== The Sicilian (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 3876-77 | Added on Friday, 1 September 17 21:06:42 Greenwich Mean Time He realized that at the root of Guiliano’s romanticism was the brilliant penetration of paranoia. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 1504-5 | Added on Sunday, 3 September 17 15:34:28 Greenwich Mean Time Buffett repeated his warning in the annual report that you can pay too much even for a wonderful business and that the overpayment risk is currently quite high. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 3391-94 | Added on Sunday, 3 September 17 21:24:12 Greenwich Mean Time a fundamental truth about the way nature works, a truth which applies to any system driven away from equilibrium, including the particular systems we are interested in, living systems. Over an extremely wide range of possibilities, whatever conditions you start out with and whatever shocks you apply to the living systems (external or internal, or both), you arrive at the self-organized critical state on the edge of chaos, where even a small trigger can, on occasion, produce a very large change in the system as a whole. Life really is like that. ========== Deep Simplicity (John Gribbin) - Highlight Loc. 3912 | Added on Monday, 4 September 17 18:46:36 Greenwich Mean Time This means that the Milky Way (like other spiral galaxies) is a region of entropy reduction. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 1006-7 | Added on Tuesday, 12 September 17 10:22:14 Greenwich Mean Time Its greatest thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, understood that change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 1331-33 | Added on Saturday, 16 September 17 19:03:43 Greenwich Mean Time It is a delicious irony that without the self-interested help of Islay, the most feared but also the most hated politician of his day, Hutcheson and his philosophy of moral altruism would never have enjoyed the sort of influence it did. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 1557-58 | Added on Sunday, 17 September 17 19:20:16 Greenwich Mean Time they worked to detach our understanding of human nature from its traditional theological moorings. Both saw human beings as the products of their environment, whether one was talking about the individual, as Hume did, or the collectivity, which was Kames’s particular focus. ========== Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (Jonathan Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 214-15 | Added on Thursday, 21 September 17 20:16:48 Greenwich Mean Time Team sports, it was thought, were to be promoted, because they discouraged solipsism, and solipsism allowed masturbation to flourish, and there could be nothing more debilitating than that. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 1710-13 | Added on Saturday, 23 September 17 18:31:37 Greenwich Mean Time if such float can be generated without an underwriting loss, a dollar of float is worth at least as much as a dollar of equity even though it appears on the balance sheet as a liability (mostly under “net loss reserves and loss adjustment reserves”). If the float is generated with an underwriting profit, it is clearly worth more than equity. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 1833-35 | Added on Saturday, 23 September 17 18:48:58 Greenwich Mean Time If profits cannot grow 5% or more, how can equities grow at 15%? Buffett put it another way: imagine a farm (the Fortune 500) valued at $10.5 trillion that produces $334 billion of profits. Paying $10.5 trillion for that farm would not produce a good return on investment. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 2192-98 | Added on Monday, 25 September 17 20:14:14 Greenwich Mean Time At Flightsafety the key is quality simulators, so Berkshire is investing $200 million annually in flight simulators. At NetJets, first-class pilots are essential, so for that business, costs are very people-intensive. In the carpet business, Buffett continued, only 15% of costs relate to employees. The big cost in that industry is the raw materials, fibers. In the insurance business, the big cost is future claims, which involves lots of estimating since claims might be paid five, 10 or 20 years later. In retail, the big cost is rent, with labor being a significant secondary cost. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 2199-2201 | Added on Monday, 25 September 17 20:14:27 Greenwich Mean Time He said he doesn’t really care whether they’re buying into raw-material-intensive businesses, people-intensive businesses or capital-intensive businesses. The key is to understand a company’s costs and why it’s got a sustainable edge against its competitors. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 2909 | Added on Thursday, 28 September 17 21:36:42 Greenwich Mean Time Buffett noted that he loves companies with untapped pricing power. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 3161-62 | Added on Friday, 29 September 17 19:59:44 Greenwich Mean Time Munger emphasized that Berkshire does not train executives, it finds them. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 3508-9 | Added on Friday, 29 September 17 20:57:38 Greenwich Mean Time Ideally, Buffett buys these businesses for 40 cents on the dollar, but he’ll pay closer to a dollar for a really great business. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 3525-26 | Added on Friday, 29 September 17 20:59:04 Greenwich Mean Time Buffett has taught in past years that it is important to know the one or two key factors in each business you own. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 3567-68 | Added on Friday, 29 September 17 21:05:52 Greenwich Mean Time We recognized early on that very smart people do very dumb things, and we wanted to know why and who so we could avoid them.” ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 490-91 | Added on Tuesday, 10 October 17 14:45:55 Greenwich Mean Time You never possessed Cleopatra, you worshiped her. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 4626 | Added on Tuesday, 10 October 17 19:16:51 Greenwich Mean Time Munger reminisced that the only business course he ever took was accounting. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 4844-45 | Added on Wednesday, 11 October 17 20:44:31 Greenwich Mean Time the next 50 years will not be as good as the last 50 years for skilled investors. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 5459-61 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 07:24:48 Greenwich Mean Time He noted the Fed’s balance sheet is up around $3.4 trillion. This is somewhat balanced out by banks with huge reserve positions. He pointed out that Wells Fargo has $175 billion at the Fed earning effectively nothing. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 5591-93 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 07:48:48 Greenwich Mean Time Munger noted that the competition for investment ideas in Buffet’s early career was much weaker than it is today. However, that does not mean that there’s nothing to be done ahead in the world of investing. ========== University of Berkshire Hathaway (Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn) - Highlight Loc. 5752-54 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 15:46:22 Greenwich Mean Time There are essentially five things public corporations can do with a dollar earned: reinvest in the business, acquire other businesses or assets, pay down debt, pay dividends, and/or buy in shares. Deciding how much to allocate to each of these five areas ideally is driven by “opportunity cost.” ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 850-51 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 16:35:27 Greenwich Mean Time Never a hurried, jerky gesture.... He played upon the emotions of the crowd as a supreme violinist does upon a Stradivarius. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 868-69 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 16:41:12 Greenwich Mean Time The male is traditionally vulnerable to the visual. The Siren who can concoct the right physical appearance will seduce in large numbers. For women the weakness is language and words: ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 941-42 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 16:55:53 Greenwich Mean Time a woman may succumb to the Rake through her yearning to be free of the constraints of virtue and decency. Indeed it is often the most virtuous woman who falls most deeply in love with the Rake. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 956-57 | Added on Sunday, 15 October 17 16:58:24 Greenwich Mean Time Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1277-78 | Added on Tuesday, 17 October 17 04:05:08 Greenwich Mean Time automatic operation of System 1. System 2, your conscious self, ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 1225-26 | Added on Wednesday, 18 October 17 13:32:31 Greenwich Mean Time Reality and long intimate exposure have a way of dulling a person’s perfection. The ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1390-93 | Added on Wednesday, 18 October 17 17:55:14 Greenwich Mean Time The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person—including things you have not observed—is known as the halo effect. The term has been in use in psychology for a century, but it has not come into wide use in everyday language. This is a pity, because the halo effect is a good name for a common bias that plays a large role in shaping our view of people and situations. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1413-14 | Added on Wednesday, 18 October 17 17:58:39 Greenwich Mean Time Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1475-77 | Added on Wednesday, 18 October 17 18:20:54 Greenwich Mean Time Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking, and comes up so often in this book, that I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1720-21 | Added on Thursday, 19 October 17 15:55:09 Greenwich Mean Time you may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 1637-41 | Added on Thursday, 19 October 17 19:44:34 Greenwich Mean Time The wonder. A wonder child has a special, inexplicable talent: a gift for music, for mathematics, for chess, for sport. At work in the field in which they have such prodigal skill, these children seem possessed, and their actions effortless. If they are artists or musicians, Mozart types, their work seems to spring from some inborn impulse, requiring remarkably little thought. If it is a physical talent that they have, they are blessed with unusual energy, dexterity, and spontaneity In both cases they seem talented beyond their years. This fascinates us. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 1866-69 | Added on Thursday, 19 October 17 20:46:47 Greenwich Mean Time Human beings are immensely suggestible; their moods will easily spread to the people around them. In fact seduction depends on mimesis, on the conscious creation of a mood or feeling that is then reproduced by the other person. But hesitation and awkwardness are also contagious, and are deadly to seduction. If in a key moment you seem indecisive or self-conscious, the other person will sense that you are thinking of yourself, instead of being overwhelmed by his or her charms. The spell will be broken. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1955-56 | Added on Sunday, 22 October 17 13:55:01 Greenwich Mean Time “To the untrained eye,” Feller remarks, “randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.” ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 1976-77 | Added on Sunday, 22 October 17 14:01:04 Greenwich Mean Time The tendency to see patterns in randomness is overwhelming—certainly more impressive than a guy making a study. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 2109-11 | Added on Sunday, 22 October 17 15:33:59 Greenwich Mean Time Indeed, the professionals were almost as susceptible to anchoring effects as business school students with no real-estate experience, whose anchoring index was 48%. The only difference between the two groups was that the students conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Bookmark Loc. 2339 | Added on Thursday, 26 October 17 14:25:56 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Bookmark Loc. 2369 | Added on Saturday, 28 October 17 12:09:33 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Bookmark Loc. 2491 | Added on Sunday, 29 October 17 14:26:02 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 2605 | Added on Tuesday, 31 October 17 07:33:02 Greenwich Mean Time frowners did show some sensitivity to the base rates. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 2607-8 | Added on Tuesday, 31 October 17 07:34:06 Greenwich Mean Time there are two possible reasons for the failure of System 2—ignorance or laziness. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 2274-76 | Added on Tuesday, 31 October 17 18:30:35 Greenwich Mean Time Nothing is of so much importance and of so much use to a young man entering life as to be well criticised by women. ” —ANDRÉ MAUROIS, DISRAELI, TRANSLATED BY HAMISH MILES ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 2286-88 | Added on Tuesday, 31 October 17 18:32:49 Greenwich Mean Time Never criticize people overtly—that will make them insecure, and resistant to change. Plant ideas, insinuate suggestions. Charmed by your diplomatic skills, people will not notice your growing power. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 2294-99 | Added on Tuesday, 31 October 17 18:40:49 Greenwich Mean Time Never pester or be overly persistent—these uncharming qualities will disrupt the relaxation you need to cast your spell. Show calm and self-possession in the face of adversity. Adversity and setbacks actually provide the perfect setting for charm. Showing a calm, unruffled exterior in the face of unpleasantness puts people at ease. You seem patient, as if waiting for destiny to deal you a better card—or as if you were confident you could charm the Fates themselves. Never show anger, ill temper, or vengefulness, all disruptive emotions that will make people defensive. In the politics of large groups, welcome adversity as a chance to show the charming qualities of magnanimity and poise. Let others get flustered and upset—the contrast will redound to your favor. Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 539-40 | Added on Saturday, 4 November 17 15:45:31 Greenwich Mean Time three emotions are so often intertwined with deceit as to merit separate explanation: fear of being caught, guilt about lying, and delight in having duped someone. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 2923-24 | Added on Sunday, 5 November 17 07:48:00 Greenwich Mean Time System 1 can deal with stories in which the elements are causally linked, but it is weak in statistical reasoning. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 2997-98 | Added on Sunday, 5 November 17 09:15:31 Greenwich Mean Time The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 2970-72 | Added on Sunday, 5 November 17 11:00:54 Greenwich Mean Time People do not want to hear that your power comes from years of effort or discipline. They prefer to think that it comes from your personality, your character, something you were born with. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 755-61 | Added on Monday, 6 November 17 08:23:13 Greenwich Mean Time To summarize, detection apprehension is greatest when: 64 Telling Lies • the target has a reputation for being tough to fool; • the target starts out being suspicious; • the liar has had little practice and no record of success; • the liar is specially vulnerable to the fear of being caught; • the stakes are high; • both rewards and punishments are at stake; or, if it is only one or the other, punishment is at stake; • the punishment for being caught lying is great, or the punishment for what the lie is about is so great that there is no incentive to confess; • the target in no way benefits from the lie. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 965-66 | Added on Thursday, 9 November 17 11:01:16 Greenwich Mean Time While lying, a person may feel duping delight, deception guilt, and detection apprehension—all at once or in succession. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Bookmark Loc. 1175 | Added on Sunday, 12 November 17 09:43:19 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 1439-40 | Added on Tuesday, 14 November 17 20:40:56 Greenwich Mean Time manipulators are discomfort signs only in more formal situations, with people who are not so familiar. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 1921-22 | Added on Saturday, 25 November 17 20:55:15 Greenwich Mean Time A lie catcher should never rely upon one clue to deceit; there must be many. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 4095-96 | Added on Saturday, 25 November 17 21:28:21 Greenwich Mean Time The acquisition of expertise in complex tasks such as high-level chess, professional basketball, or firefighting is intricate and slow because expertise in a domain is not a single skill but rather a large collection of miniskills. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 4152-53 | Added on Saturday, 25 November 17 21:37:25 Greenwich Mean Time intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2086-87 | Added on Sunday, 26 November 17 08:04:59 Greenwich Mean Time The face may contain many different clues to deceit: micros, squelched expressions, leakage in the reliable facial muscles, blinking, pupil dilation, tearing, blushing and blanching, asymmetry, mistakes in timing, mistakes in location, and false smiles. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 3398-99 | Added on Sunday, 26 November 17 19:48:25 Greenwich Mean Time Seduction is a form of persuasion that seeks to bypass consciousness, stirring the unconscious mind instead. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2173-74 | Added on Sunday, 26 November 17 21:09:34 Greenwich Mean Time The only way to reduce mistakes due to the Brokaw Dangers and Precautions 167 hazard is to base judgments on a change in the suspect's behavior. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2190-92 | Added on Sunday, 26 November 17 21:13:53 Greenwich Mean Time The interpretation of four sources of leakage—slips of the tongue, emotional tirades, emblematic slips, and micro expressions—is not so vulnerable to the Brokaw hazard. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2281 | Added on Friday, 1 December 17 10:31:27 Greenwich Mean Time Chapter 3 explained how to estimate whether a liar is likely to feel detection apprehension, deception guilt, or duping delight. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2418-20 | Added on Saturday, 2 December 17 12:06:13 Greenwich Mean Time When the suspect doesn't know there is suspicion, the lie catcher is less likely to make disbelieving-the-truth errors because the signs of emotion, if they occur, are more likely to be clues to deceit; but there may be more believing-a-lie mistakes, because feelings about lying are less likely to be strong enough to betray the liar. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2420-21 | Added on Saturday, 2 December 17 12:06:52 Greenwich Mean Time The reverse probably happens if suspicion is known— more disbelieving-the-truth but less believing-a-lie. ========== The Art of Seduction (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 3596-97 | Added on Sunday, 3 December 17 19:09:42 Greenwich Mean Time In seduction, the key weapon is boldness, refusing the target the time to stop and think. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 5424-26 | Added on Saturday, 9 December 17 10:35:38 Greenwich Mean Time When you pay attention to a threat, you worry—and the decision weights reflect how much you worry. Because of the possibility effect, the worry is not proportional to the probability of the threat. Reducing or mitigating the risk is not adequate; to eliminate the worry the probability must be brought down to zero. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 5437-38 | Added on Saturday, 9 December 17 10:36:08 Greenwich Mean Time people attach values to gains and losses rather than to wealth, and the decision weights that they assign to outcomes are different from probabilities. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 5735-37 | Added on Sunday, 10 December 17 21:50:50 Greenwich Mean Time Obsessive concerns (the bus in Jerusalem), vivid images (the roses), concrete representations (1 of 1,000), and explicit reminders (as in choice from description) all contribute to overweighting. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 5884-85 | Added on Monday, 11 December 17 09:52:58 Greenwich Mean Time The ultimate currency that rewards or punishes is often emotional, a form of mental self-dealing that inevitably creates conflicts of interest when the individual acts as an agent on behalf of an organization. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 5991-92 | Added on Monday, 11 December 17 10:50:35 Greenwich Mean Time people expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6395 | Added on Wednesday, 13 December 17 09:39:43 Greenwich Mean Time Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6398 | Added on Wednesday, 13 December 17 09:40:22 Greenwich Mean Time Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6591 | Added on Wednesday, 13 December 17 10:28:53 Greenwich Mean Time System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6617-18 | Added on Wednesday, 13 December 17 10:36:24 Greenwich Mean Time Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6782-83 | Added on Thursday, 14 December 17 20:40:27 Greenwich Mean Time Attention is key. Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6782-84 | Added on Thursday, 14 December 17 20:41:13 Greenwich Mean Time Attention is key. Our emotional state is largely determined by what we attend to, and we are normally focused on our current activity and immediate environment. There are exceptions, where the quality of subjective experience is dominated by recurrent thoughts rather than by the events of the moment. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 6791-92 | Added on Thursday, 14 December 17 20:42:50 Greenwich Mean Time another way to improve experience is to switch time from passive leisure, such as TV watching, to more active forms of leisure, including socializing and exercise. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 7222-24 | Added on Friday, 15 December 17 16:58:21 Greenwich Mean Time labels such as “anchoring effects,” “narrow framing,” or “excessive coherence” bring together in memory everything we know about a bias, its causes, its effects, and what can be done about it. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 7790-91 | Added on Wednesday, 20 December 17 18:04:18 Greenwich Mean Time This is the rationale for the standard admonition to students of business, that they should consider each decision problem in terms of total assets rather than in terms of gains or losses ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 7839-40 | Added on Wednesday, 20 December 17 18:14:49 Greenwich Mean Time We attribute the failure of invariance to the interaction of two factors: the framing of probabilities and the nonlinearity of decision weights. ========== Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) - Highlight Loc. 7945-46 | Added on Wednesday, 20 December 17 18:40:57 Greenwich Mean Time Regret, frustration, and self-satisfaction can also be affected by framing ========== The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success (William N. Thorndike) - Highlight Loc. 669-70 | Added on Wednesday, 3 January 18 17:04:18 Greenwich Mean Time He did not buy indiscriminately, avoiding turnaround situations, and focusing instead on profitable, growing companies with leading market positions, often in niche markets. ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 1369-72 | Added on Friday, 19 January 18 11:17:57 Greenwich Mean Time “Don’t worry, Mr. Gronevelt,” he said. “I won’t fuck up. I appreciate what you’re doing for me. I won’t let you down.” Gronevelt nodded his head slowly. His back was turned to Cully, and he was staring out the huge window to the desert and mountains beyond. “Words don’t mean anything,” he said. “I’m counting on your being smart. ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 1951-53 | Added on Saturday, 20 January 18 07:37:23 Greenwich Mean Time “love is like the little red toy wagon you get for Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can’t leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disas­ter.” ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 3712-19 | Added on Friday, 26 January 18 21:23:29 Greenwich Mean Time And I have to admit Osano charmed me. At the party he got into a furious argument with one of the most powerful literary critics in America, who was also a close friend and supporter of his work. But the critic had dared voice the opinion that nonfiction writers were creating art and that some critics were artists. Osano swarmed all over him. “You bloodsucking cocksucker,” he shouted, drink balanced in one hand, his other hand poised as if ready to throw a punch. “You have the fucking nerve to make a living off real writers and then say you’re the artist? You don’t even know what art is. An artist creates out of nothing but himself, do you under­stand that, you fucking asshole? He’s like a fucking spider, the cobwebs are packed away in his body. And you pricks just come along and blow them away with your fucking housewife brooms after he spins them out. You’re good with a broom, you fucking jerkoff, that’s all you are.” His friend was stunned because he had just praised Osano’s nonfiction books and said they were art. ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 3772-77 | Added on Saturday, 27 January 18 05:52:21 Greenwich Mean Time Osano was really pissed off about that. “That prick,” he said. “He told me to read the classics for inspiration. That ignorant fuck. Have you ever tried to read the classics over again? Jesus, those old fuckers like Hardy and Tolstoy and Galsworthy had it made. They took forty pages to let out a fart. And you know why? They had their readers trapped. They had them by the balls. No TV, no radio, no movies. No traveling unless you wanted cysts over your asshole from bouncing around on stagecoaches. In England you couldn’t even get flicked. Maybe that’s why the French writers were more disciplined. The French at least were into fucking, not like those English Victorian jerkoffs. Now I ask you why should a guy with a TV set and a beach house read Proust?” ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 5706-7 | Added on Tuesday, 30 January 18 19:59:42 Greenwich Mean Time “When I hear the word ‘love,’ I reach for my wallet.” ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 5855-60 | Added on Wednesday, 31 January 18 15:12:07 Greenwich Mean Time Kellino said abruptly, harshly, “Fuck him. Let him go. We don’t need him.” For the first time I looked directly at Kellino, and I remembered Osano’s description of him. As usual, Kellino was dressed beautifully, perfectly cut suit, a marvelous shirt, silky brown shoes, He looked beautiful, and I remembered Osano’s use of the Italian peasant word caf one. “A ca/one,” he said, “is a peasant who had risen to great riches and great fame and tries to make himself a member of the nobility. He does everything right. He learns his manners, he improves his speech and he dresses like an angel. But no matter how beautiful he dresses, no matter how much care he takes, no matter how much time he cleans, there clings to his shoe one tiny piece of shit.” ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 6920-25 | Added on Thursday, 1 February 18 16:27:23 Greenwich Mean Time He said, “He never talks about being an orphan too. All adults are orphans really. We all lose our parents when we grow into adulthood.” Janelle was instantly interested. She had told me she ad­mired Osano’s mind and his books. She said, “I think that’s brilliant. And it’s true.” “It’s full of shit,” I said. “If you’re both going to use lan­guage to communicate, use words for their meaning. An or­phan is a child who grows up without parents and many times without any blood relationships in the world. An adult is not an orphan. He’s a fucking prick who’s got no use for his mother and father because they are a pain in the ass and he doesn’t need them anymore.” ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 7128-29 | Added on Thursday, 1 February 18 18:08:09 Greenwich Mean Time Only those we most love can cause our death, and only of them we must be­ware. Our enemies can never harm us. ========== Fools Die: A Novel (Mario Puzo) - Highlight Loc. 7979-83 | Added on Thursday, 1 February 18 19:57:29 Greenwich Mean Time When I was young, some women told me they loved me for my long eyelashes. I accepted. Later it was for my Wit. Then for my power and money. Then for my talent. Then for my mind—deep. OK, I can handle all of it. The only woman who scares me is the one who loves me for myself alone. I have plans for her. 1 have poisons and daggers and dark graves in caves to hide her head. She can’t be allowed to live. Especially if she is sexually faithful and never lies and always puts me ahead of everything and everyone. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 214-15 | Added on Friday, 9 February 18 12:11:49 Greenwich Mean Time The primary role of the central bank, as the Act suggests, is monetary stability, that is, to sustain confidence in the value of the country’s money. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 362-63 | Added on Saturday, 10 February 18 19:38:43 Greenwich Mean Time ultimately, inflation comes from demand exceeding supply, and it can be curtailed only by bringing both in balance. We need to reduce demand somewhat without having serious adverse effects on investment and supply. This is a balancing act, which requires the Reserve Bank to act firmly ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 374-77 | Added on Saturday, 10 February 18 19:47:53 Greenwich Mean Time Third, we need to enlist markets in the aid of banking. Liquid markets will help banks offload risks they should not bear, such as interest rate or exchange risk. They will also allow banks to sell assets that they have no comparative advantage in holding, such as long-term loans to completed infrastructure projects, which are better held by infrastructure funds, pension funds, and insurance companies. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Bookmark Loc. 469 | Added on Sunday, 11 February 18 10:19:07 Greenwich Mean Time ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1032-34 | Added on Saturday, 17 February 18 18:20:48 Greenwich Mean Time Banks in India have been subject to the grand bargain, whereby they get the benefits of raising low-cost insured deposits, liquidity support and close regulation by the central bank (I am sure some of you see this as a cost) in return for maintaining reserves with the central bank, holding government bonds to meet SLR requirements, and lending to the priority sector. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1182-84 | Added on Wednesday, 7 March 18 12:44:04 Greenwich Mean Time RBI has moved cautiously on liberalizing fixed income and derivatives markets. What is there about these markets for central banks to worry about? Typically, three issues. We have always worried that markets attract speculators, and that in thin markets, the speculative element can move market prices away from fundamentals. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1188-89 | Added on Wednesday, 7 March 18 12:44:54 Greenwich Mean Time Second, markets can be a source of competition for established institutional players. For instance, as I noted above, high quality corporate credits can migrate from banks to debt markets. This may push banks into higher risk lending. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1196-98 | Added on Wednesday, 7 March 18 14:03:31 Greenwich Mean Time Third, we worry about unbridled innovation that attempts to get around prudential and supervisory norms and ends up creating uncertain valuations and systemic risk. For instance, the fixed income products and derivatives structured around housing mortgage pools in the United States became hard to value as house prices turned down. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1208-9 | Added on Wednesday, 7 March 18 14:06:51 Greenwich Mean Time Most recently, even though retail investors form a small part of the global fixed income market, we are working to enhance their access to the institution-dominated screen-based NDS-OM market ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1355-57 | Added on Thursday, 8 March 18 14:54:43 Greenwich Mean Time How can we get entities within the system to rely on each other’s KYC, without the process having to be continuously repeated? How can technology assist in effectively addressing the above issues? These are questions we have to examine and address. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1406-8 | Added on Thursday, 8 March 18 15:34:36 Greenwich Mean Time Technology, with its capacity to reduce transaction costs, is key to enabling the large volume low-ticket transaction that is at the centre of financial inclusion. By collecting and processing large volumes of data easily, technology can also improve the quality of financial decision making. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 2741-44 | Added on Thursday, 8 March 18 20:30:11 Greenwich Mean Time Foulis had put into play a basic principle of his teacher Francis Hutcheson’s view of art in relation to life. This was that God had made human virtue beautiful as well as useful, and that physical beauty, or “uniformity amidst variety,” was, like the arts, essential to human happiness. It is the spirit of Scottish neoclassicism, and would carry over in the works of two other Scots— Edinburgh men this time, not Glaswegians—Robert and James Adam. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 1545-46 | Added on Saturday, 10 March 18 19:55:46 Greenwich Mean Time we are encouraged by the emergence of full-service entities that help the small business with marketing and logistics, while tying up with a finance company to provide the business with credit. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 2099-2102 | Added on Tuesday, 13 March 18 10:21:22 Greenwich Mean Time Indian cricket fans are manic-depressive in their treatment of their favourite teams. They elevate players to god-like status when their team performs well, ignoring obvious weaknesses; but when it loses, as any team must, the fall is equally steep and every weakness is dissected. In fact, the team is never as good as fans make it out to be when it wins, nor as bad as it is made out to be when it loses. Its weaknesses existed in victory, too, but were overlooked. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 2148-50 | Added on Tuesday, 13 March 18 10:37:07 Greenwich Mean Time The monsoon has been good and will spur consumption, especially in rural areas, which are already growing strongly, owing to improvements in road transport and communications connectivity. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 3214-17 | Added on Tuesday, 13 March 18 19:44:59 Greenwich Mean Time Although he did go to England to study at Oxford for seven years, he found nothing of value there. He summed up his experience there in his description of the average university as a “sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection, after they have been hunted out of every other corner of the world.” ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 3299-3300 | Added on Tuesday, 13 March 18 20:07:14 Greenwich Mean Time “it is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise, at first, among any people unless that people enjoy the blessing of a free government.” ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 2330-31 | Added on Wednesday, 14 March 18 11:01:02 Greenwich Mean Time One of the greatest dangers to the growth of developing countries is the middle income trap, where crony capitalism creates oligarchies that slow down growth. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 3550-51 | Added on Wednesday, 14 March 18 17:09:44 Greenwich Mean Time Smith saw the important beneficiaries of the free market not as businessmen but as consumers. “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 3562-65 | Added on Wednesday, 14 March 18 17:14:17 Greenwich Mean Time But Smith saw another, more systematic corruption flowing from commercial society, one that was more pernicious and worried him deeply. Even as capitalism increases specialization, and more sophistication in the overall output of goods and services, the individuals caught up in the process become narrower in their interests and less concerned with what happens outside their shop, office, or showroom. They come to weigh everything in terms of their job, of profit and loss, and lose sight of the larger picture. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Bookmark Loc. 2462 | Added on Thursday, 15 March 18 13:54:07 Greenwich Mean Time ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 2480-81 | Added on Thursday, 15 March 18 14:27:37 Greenwich Mean Time We will have to strengthen government (and regulatory) capability resisting the temptation to implant layers and layers of checks and balances even before capacity has taken root. ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 2530-39 | Added on Friday, 16 March 18 06:29:08 Greenwich Mean Time To achieve this goal, it has to implement its ambitious plans for building out infrastructure. This includes Physically linking every corner of the country to domestic and international markets through roads, railways, ports and airports. The kind of economic activity that is generated when a pukka all-weather road is built into a village – the explosion of horticulture, poultry, and dairy farming, the opening of clothing and assorted goods shops, the increasing use of powered vehicles – is extraordinary, as is the kind of activity that emerges around national highways. Ensuring the availability of inputs such as power, minerals, and water at competitive prices. Linking everyone electronically and financially to the broader system through mobiles, broadband, and intermediaries such as business correspondents. Encouraging the development of public institutions such as markets, warehouses, regulators, information aggregators and disseminators, etc. Making possible affordable and safe homes and workplaces. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 4186-89 | Added on Monday, 19 March 18 19:23:24 Greenwich Mean Time Federal versus state power, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both: add the disparate economic interests of bankers versus farmers, slaveholding southerners versus commercial-minded northerners, and thirteen semisovereign political units, plus indirect elections at the senatorial and presidential level to frustrate the raw, crude will of the people—and what you have is not chaos, as the critics might expect, but stability, and above all liberty. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 4186-89 | Added on Monday, 19 March 18 19:24:07 Greenwich Mean Time Federal versus state power, executive versus legislative, and judicial versus them both: add the disparate economic interests of bankers versus farmers, slaveholding southerners versus commercial-minded northerners, and thirteen semisovereign political units, plus indirect elections at the senatorial and presidential level to frustrate the raw, crude will of the people—and what you have is not chaos, as the critics might expect, but stability, and above all liberty. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 4190-91 | Added on Monday, 19 March 18 19:25:03 Greenwich Mean Time Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 4280-81 | Added on Monday, 19 March 18 19:59:17 Greenwich Mean Time He endorsed Reid’s view that the common man was “a man of integrity” who “sees his duty without reasoning, as he sees the highway.” ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 5525-27 | Added on Tuesday, 3 April 18 09:20:09 Greenwich Mean Time “National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness,” he admonished, “as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.” ========== I Do What I Do (Raghuram G. Rajan) - Highlight Loc. 4498-4501 | Added on Thursday, 5 April 18 17:53:36 Greenwich Mean Time no one has the ‘magic bullet’ for growth, there are some things that do seem important. These include sensible macroeconomic management, with fiscal discipline, moderate inflation, and a reasonably competitive exchange rate; laws and policies that create an environment conducive to private sector activity with low transaction costs; and an economy open for international trade. ========== How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (Arthur Herman) - Highlight Loc. 5700-5703 | Added on Friday, 6 April 18 18:56:06 Greenwich Mean Time Dugald Stewart had repeatedly emphasized to students that how a government came into being—whether by democratic or representative means, or by hereditary rule or even by conquest—mattered less than what the government did when it got there. As long as it promoted progress and protected the rights of the individual and property; as long as it kept pace with social and economic change and expanded opportunities for everyone, then it was good government, no matter who was in charge. If it did not, then it was a failure, no matter how many people voted for it. ========== An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) - Highlight Loc. 53-54 | Added on Sunday, 8 April 18 18:27:55 Greenwich Mean Time The causes of this improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the order according to which its produce is naturally distributed among the different ranks and conditions of men in the society, make the subject of the first book of this Inquiry. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 379-80 | Added on Sunday, 22 April 18 09:11:46 Greenwich Mean Time There’s an important and foundational lesson illustrated in each of these anecdotes, which is that an information-based environment delivers fundamentally disruptive opportunities. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 401-28 | Added on Sunday, 22 April 18 09:18:23 Greenwich Mean Time 3D printing Cost (averages) for equivalent functionality: $40,000 (2007) to $100 (2014) Scale: 400x in 7 years Industrial robots Cost: $500,000 (2008) to $22,000 (2013) Scale: 23x in 5 years Drones Cost: $100,000 (2007) to $700 (2013) Scale: 142x in 6 years Solar Cost: $30 per kWh (1984) to $0.16 per kWh (2014) Scale: 200x in 20 years Sensors (3D LIDAR sensor) Cost: $20,000 (2009) to $79 (2014) Scale: 250x in 5 years Biotech (DNA sequencing of one whole human DNA profile) Cost: $10 million (2007) to $1,000 (2014) Scale: 10,000x in 7 years Neurotech (BCI devices) Cost: $4,000 (2006) to $90 (2011) Scale: 44x in 5 years Medicine (full body scan) Cost: $10,000 (2000) to $500 (2014) Scale: 20x in 14 years ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 1289-92 | Added on Sunday, 13 May 18 23:07:06 Greenwich Mean Time ‘What do you mean?’ said Frodo. ‘Surely the Ring was his Precious and the only thing he cared for? But if he hated it, why didn’t he get rid of it, or go away and leave it?’ ‘You ought to begin to understand, Frodo, after all you have heard,’ said Gandalf. ‘He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter. ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 1299-1302 | Added on Sunday, 13 May 18 23:09:19 Greenwich Mean Time The Ring was trying to get back to its master. It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Déagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean; and as long as it stayed with him he would never leave his deep pool again. So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire! ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 1319-20 | Added on Sunday, 13 May 18 23:12:04 Greenwich Mean Time ‘The murder of Déagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defence, repeating it to his “Precious” over and over again, as he gnawed bones in the dark, until he almost believed it. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 887-89 | Added on Monday, 14 May 18 22:52:02 Greenwich Mean Time The reality is that most of the world’s smartest people don’t have the right credentials. They don’t speak the right language. They didn’t grow up in the right country. They didn’t go to the right university. They don’t know about you and you don’t know about them. They’re not available, and they already have a job. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 1459-60 | Added on Saturday, 19 May 18 07:06:54 Greenwich Mean Time “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Bookmark Loc. 1586 | Added on Saturday, 19 May 18 08:03:49 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 1974-76 | Added on Monday, 21 May 18 03:30:38 Greenwich Mean Time Companies made strategic investments by looking ahead a decade or more, and the five-year plan served as the central document outlining the implementation details of those long-term strategic bets. However, in an exponential world, the five-year plan is not only unworkable, it is seriously counterproductive—and ========== The Road to Ruin (James Rickards) - Highlight Loc. 238-39 | Added on Tuesday, 22 May 18 11:59:38 Greenwich Mean Time Bayes’ theorem is how you solve a problem when there is not enough initial data to satisfy the demands of normal statistics. ========== The Road to Ruin (James Rickards) - Highlight Loc. 250 | Added on Tuesday, 22 May 18 12:01:52 Greenwich Mean Time Classical economists including Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Bentham, among others, appeal in part because none of them had Ph.D.s. ========== The Road to Ruin (James Rickards) - Highlight Loc. 516-17 | Added on Tuesday, 22 May 18 15:57:30 Greenwich Mean Time The war on cash and the rush to negative interest rates are advancing in lockstep, two sides of the same coin. ========== The Road to Ruin (James Rickards) - Highlight Loc. 712-13 | Added on Wednesday, 23 May 18 06:33:21 Greenwich Mean Time As long as oil flowed, only Europe, Japan, and Canada mattered to U.S. economic interests, and they were locked in to the Bretton Woods system. ========== The Road to Ruin (James Rickards) - Highlight Loc. 966-67 | Added on Monday, 4 June 18 04:02:25 Greenwich Mean Time “fractional reserve banking,” in which physical gold held was a fraction of paper promises made. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Bookmark Loc. 281 | Added on Monday, 4 June 18 13:28:50 Greenwich Mean Time ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 148-49 | Added on Monday, 4 June 18 17:49:03 Greenwich Mean Time In the 1850s came another boom and collapse, and in those years a New England bank, in a part of the country more cautious than most, closed down. It had $500,000 in notes outstanding and assets to cover them of $86.48. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 326-29 | Added on Wednesday, 6 June 18 19:44:55 Greenwich Mean Time "The Exchange is a market place where prices reflect the basic law of supply and demand," the New York Stock Exchange says firmly of itself.12 Yet even the most devout Wall Streeter allows himself on occasion to believe that more personal influences have a hand in his destiny. Somewhere around there are big men who put stocks up and put them down. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 395-96 | Added on Wednesday, 6 June 18 19:57:49 Greenwich Mean Time there was still another and even more significant index of what was happening in the market. That was the phenomenal increase in trading on margin. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 3064 | Added on Friday, 8 June 18 05:00:59 Greenwich Mean Time “If you are relying on innovation solely from within your company, you’re dead.” ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Bookmark Loc. 3091 | Added on Friday, 8 June 18 05:23:37 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 3168-70 | Added on Friday, 8 June 18 08:21:51 Greenwich Mean Time Optimizers: Run large businesses at scale and squeeze efficiency to maximize profits. Scalers: Take a proven model and grow it. Evangelists: Champion new ideas and move projects from the idea stage to initial commercialization. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 3244-45 | Added on Friday, 8 June 18 08:36:29 Greenwich Mean Time The real question then is not whether to acquire an ExO, but when to partner with an ExO, when to invest in one and when to acquire it. ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Bookmark Loc. 3411 | Added on Saturday, 9 June 18 15:13:11 Greenwich Mean Time ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 3547-55 | Added on Wednesday, 13 June 18 19:10:23 Greenwich Mean Time Profit Model: How you make money Network: How you connect with others to create value Structure: How you organize and align your talent and assets Process: How you use signature or superior methods to do your work Product Performance: How you develop distinguishing features and functionality Product System: How you create complementary products and services Service: How you support and amplify the value of your offerings Channel: How you deliver your offerings to customers and users Brand: How you represent your offerings and business Customer Engagement: How you foster compelling interactions ========== Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) (Salim Ismail, Michael S. Malone and Yuri van Geest) - Highlight Loc. 4303-5 | Added on Friday, 15 June 18 06:37:48 Greenwich Mean Time It is important to note that the need for long-distance transport will drop over time due to the rise of localized production and a growing circular economy (recycling). More and more products will be produced on the spot through local partners (Leveraged Assets), access to 3D printers and cheap labor provided by highly customizable robots. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 3383-84 | Added on Sunday, 17 June 18 15:46:49 Greenwich Mean Time With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3635-38 | Added on Thursday, 21 June 18 17:12:05 Greenwich Mean Time an eliciting or triggering condition (displays of charity, gratitude, or other virtues); physical changes in the body (“dilation” in the chest); a motivation (a desire of “doing charitable and grateful acts also”); and a characteristic feeling beyond bodily sensations (elevated sentiments). Jefferson had described exactly the emotion I had just “discovered.” ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 3821-23 | Added on Thursday, 21 June 18 17:42:50 Greenwich Mean Time egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feels merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 3862-63 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 01:24:24 Greenwich Mean Time Eastern religions rely heavily on meditation, an effective means of quieting the chatter of the self. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3916-19 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 01:37:54 Greenwich Mean Time On issue after issue, liberals want to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions. The religious right, on the other hand, wants to structure personal, social, and political relationships in three dimensions and so create a landscape of purity and pollution where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 3916-20 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 01:39:14 Greenwich Mean Time liberals want to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions. The religious right, on the other hand, wants to structure personal, social, and political relationships in three dimensions and so create a landscape of purity and pollution where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane. For the religious right, hell on earth is a flat land of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 4018-19 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 02:04:07 Greenwich Mean Time life is much like a movie we walk into well after its opening scene, and we will have to step out long before most of the story lines reach their conclusions. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 4059-62 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 02:16:27 Greenwich Mean Time the amazing thing I learned about plants is that as long as they are not completely dead, they will spring back to full and glorious life if you just get the conditions right. You can’t fix a plant; you can only give it the right conditions—water, sun, and soil—and then wait. It will do the rest. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 4062-64 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 02:16:43 Greenwich Mean Time If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 223 | Loc. 4136-39 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 02:32:18 Greenwich Mean Time Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors (as I suggested as a temporary fix at the end of chapter 5). The correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I’ll illustrate below, is that happiness comes from between. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 225 | Loc. 4172-73 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 02:38:27 Greenwich Mean Time Vital engagement does not reside in the person or in the environment; it exists in the relationship between the two. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 234 | Loc. 4349-50 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 04:05:18 Greenwich Mean Time Respect for rules is enhanced when rules have an element of sacredness, and when they are backed up by supernatural sanction and the gossip or ostracism of one’s peers. ========== The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science (Jonathan Haidt) - Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 4385-88 | Added on Friday, 22 June 18 04:33:41 Greenwich Mean Time mystical experience is an “off” button for the self. When the self is turned off, people become just a cell in the larger body, a bee in the larger hive. It is no wonder that the after effects of mystical experience are predictable; people usually feel a stronger commitment to God or to helping others, often by bringing them to God. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 471-73 | Added on Saturday, 7 July 18 08:44:35 Greenwich Mean Time One of the oldest puzzles of politics is who is to regulate the regulators. But an equally baffling problem, which has never received the attention it deserves, is who is to make wise those who are required to have wisdom. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 580-81 | Added on Monday, 6 August 18 06:07:11 Greenwich Mean Time Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the most unpredictable in their consequences. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 910-13 | Added on Wednesday, 8 August 18 05:46:12 Greenwich Mean Time a combined investment trust and holding company system with a market value in 1929 at close to a billion dollars.17 This had been built on his original control of a smallish concern—the Central States Electric Corporation—which was worth only some six million dollars in 1921. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 1117-18 | Added on Friday, 10 August 18 05:53:55 Greenwich Mean Time Only the most aggressive of the eccentrics maintained their detachment from the market and their interest in autosuggestion or communism. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 1129-30 | Added on Friday, 10 August 18 05:58:53 Greenwich Mean Time Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 1950-51 | Added on Monday, 13 August 18 06:16:08 Greenwich Mean Time Finally, there is the meeting which is called not because there is business to be done, but because it is necessary to create the impression that business is being done. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 1966-70 | Added on Monday, 13 August 18 06:25:05 Greenwich Mean Time No responsible political leader could safely proclaim a policy of keeping hands off. The no-business meetings at the White House were a practical expression of laissez faire. No positive action resulted. At the same time they gave a sense of truly impressive action. The conventions governing the no-business session insured that there would be no embarrassment arising from the absence of business. Those who attended accepted as a measure of the importance of the meetings the importance of the people attending. The newspapers also cooperated in emphasizing the importance of the sessions. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 1971-73 | Added on Monday, 13 August 18 06:25:47 Greenwich Mean Time In recent times the no-business meeting at the White House—attended by governors, industrialists, representatives of business, labor, and agriculture—has become an established institution of government. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 283-84 | Added on Monday, 13 August 18 07:12:30 Greenwich Mean Time While it may have succeeded in controlling inflation, the gold standard was incapable of preventing the sort of financial booms and busts that were, and continue to be, such a feature of the economic landscape. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 287-90 | Added on Monday, 13 August 18 07:13:31 Greenwich Mean Time Each of these episodes differed in detail. Some originated in the stock market, some in the credit market, some in the foreign exchange market, occasionally even in the world of commodities. Sometimes they affected a single country, sometimes a group of countries, very occasionally the whole world. All, however, shared a common pattern: an eerily similar cycle from greed to fear. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2300-2302 | Added on Tuesday, 14 August 18 05:47:58 Greenwich Mean Time Moreover, regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age—after a matter of ten or fifteen years—they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2391-92 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 07:33:04 Greenwich Mean Time First there is the question of why economic activity turned down in 1929. Second there is the vastly more important question of why, having started down, on this unhappy occasion it went down and down and down and remained low for a full decade. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2434-37 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 07:56:55 Greenwich Mean Time This highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent on a high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both. The rich cannot buy great quantities of bread. If they are to dispose of what they receive it must be on luxuries or by way of investment in new plants and new projects. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2444-45 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 07:59:08 Greenwich Mean Time The most important corporate weakness was inherent in the vast new structure of holding companies and investment trusts. The holding companies controlled large segments of the utility, railroad, and entertainment business. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2517-18 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 09:06:21 Greenwich Mean Time From 1930 on the budget was far out of balance, and balance, therefore, meant an increase in taxes, a reduction in spending, or both. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2526-27 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 09:14:21 Greenwich Mean Time Until 1932 the United States added formidably to its gold reserves, and instead of inflation the country was experiencing the most violent deflation in the nation's history. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2579-80 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 10:24:12 Greenwich Mean Time it is that very specific and personal misfortune awaits those who presume to believe that the future is revealed to them. ========== The Great Crash of 1929 (John Kenneth Galbraith) - Highlight Loc. 2632 | Added on Wednesday, 15 August 18 10:44:59 Greenwich Mean Time there is still a considerable difference between a failure to do enough that is right and a determination to do much that is wrong. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 1097-99 | Added on Saturday, 18 August 18 06:27:21 Greenwich Mean Time By then the five major powers—Britain, France, Russia, Germany, AustriaHungary—werespending a massive $3 billion each month, nearly 50 percent of their collective GDP. No other war in history had absorbed so much of the wealth of so many nations at one time. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 1412-13 | Added on Sunday, 19 August 18 06:59:39 Greenwich Mean Time Nine million civilians had perished, mostly of hunger, cold, or lowered resistance to the monstrous epidemics. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 1420-21 | Added on Sunday, 19 August 18 07:03:24 Greenwich Mean Time In four years of constant and obsessive battle, the governments of Europe had spent some $200 billion, consuming almost half of their nations’ GDP in mutual destruction. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 1744-45 | Added on Sunday, 19 August 18 09:40:27 Greenwich Mean Time By August 1923, a dollar was worth 620,000 marks and by early November 1923, 630 billion. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 1779-80 | Added on Sunday, 19 August 18 09:48:54 Greenwich Mean Time Imperial officers took jobs as bank clerks, middle-class families took in lodgers, professors begged on the streets, and young ladies from respectable families became prostitutes. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 2417-18 | Added on Tuesday, 21 August 18 12:51:39 Greenwich Mean Time The gold standard had only worked in the late nineteenth century because new mining discoveries had fortuitously kept pace with economic growth. There was no guarantee that this accident of history would continue. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 2432-34 | Added on Tuesday, 21 August 18 12:57:18 Greenwich Mean Time inflation was much more than simply prices going up, but also a subtle mechanism for transferring wealth between social groups—from savers, creditors, and wage earners to the government, debtors, and businessmen. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 2775-78 | Added on Wednesday, 22 August 18 06:32:15 Greenwich Mean Time Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be director of the opponent’s fate. —SUN Tzu, The Art of War ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 304-7 | Added on Thursday, 23 August 18 18:52:05 Greenwich Mean Time Studies on appetite show that variety is strongly associated with overconsumption. You will eat more at a buffet than you will when meatloaf is the only thing on the table. In neither scenario will you leave hungry but in one you will leave regretful. In other words, [if you want to circumvent overconsumption and its problems] avoid the buffets of life. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 587-91 | Added on Friday, 24 August 18 12:25:43 Greenwich Mean Time Prior to my re-boot, my erect penis was very sensitive (hypersensitive) making ejaculation embarrassingly easy (quick). My penis would get rock hard and stand at attention at 12 o'clock, the skin stretched tight like a snare drum. My penis was a fuelled rocket sitting on the launch pad. Countdown starts at 10 seconds, 9, 8, 7, 6,5,4,3,2 … 1, ORGASM. The words ‘Sorry dear’ became my motto. But today, 52 days into re-boot, my penis is no longer on the rocket launch pad. It stands at 10 o'clock. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 609-10 | Added on Friday, 24 August 18 12:29:01 Greenwich Mean Time Before, orgasms were absolutely phenomenal (my f--king knees would literally shake), but now I cum with a mechanical twitch and no sort of real gratitude toward the act (and that is including with women). ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 800-802 | Added on Saturday, 25 August 18 12:16:28 Greenwich Mean Time In his famous TED talk “The Demise of Guys”, well known psychologist Phillip Zimbardo noted that ‘arousal addiction’ (porn, video games) is a major factor in the increase in social awkwardness and anxiety and among digital natives. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 841-42 | Added on Saturday, 25 August 18 12:24:09 Greenwich Mean Time German researchers recently confirmed that moderate porn use, even by non-addicts, correlates with shrunken grey matter in regions of the brain associated with cognitive function. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 1113 | Added on Sunday, 26 August 18 20:07:37 Greenwich Mean Time Already, some seventy brain studies on internet addicts reveal the presence of the same core brain changes seen in substance addicts ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 1375-76 | Added on Monday, 27 August 18 08:17:47 Greenwich Mean Time Decreased risk-taking[153] and increased anxiety, combined with a tendency toward angry overreaction, [154] any of which can decrease willingness to socialize, ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 1639-40 | Added on Tuesday, 28 August 18 06:36:20 Greenwich Mean Time Hang out and read in a library or bookstore, or take a magazine to a coffee shop or park bench. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 1893-94 | Added on Wednesday, 29 August 18 05:44:24 Greenwich Mean Time ‘When _____ occurs (trigger), I will ________ (new routine), because it gives me ____ (the reward)’. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 2238 | Added on Thursday, 30 August 18 06:22:39 Greenwich Mean Time Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 2287-88 | Added on Thursday, 30 August 18 06:28:41 Greenwich Mean Time It’s hard to imagine that a whole generation chain-smoked cigarettes without having any idea how harmful they are, but the same thing is happening today with online pornography. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 9680-81 | Added on Saturday, 1 September 18 06:08:57 Greenwich Mean Time Because under the gold standard, the price of gold was fixed in dollar terms, the first symptom of a gold shortage was not a rise in its price—that by definition could not happen—but a fall in the price of all other commodities. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 4472-74 | Added on Sunday, 2 September 18 05:44:20 Greenwich Mean Time As the New York Times described it, “The old-timers, who usually play the market by note, are behind the times and wrong,” while the “new crop of speculators who play entirely by ear are right.” ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 4605-8 | Added on Sunday, 2 September 18 06:58:11 Greenwich Mean Time Any further measures to bring the market to earth were bound to inflict collateral damage to the economy, especially on farmers. Moreover, capital had once again begun flowing in from abroad, attracted by the returns on Wall Street. Were the Fed to raise interest rates now, it might well pull in even more gold, possibly even forcing sterling off the gold standard. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 4995-96 | Added on Sunday, 2 September 18 11:10:27 Greenwich Mean Time John J. Raskob, the man who sincerely wanted everyone to be rich and was touting stocks as a long-term investment in the Ladies’ Home Journal, had apparently liquidated most of his portfolio before his article appeared. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 5302-3 | Added on Monday, 3 September 18 07:30:56 Greenwich Mean Time Shy, insecure, and stiff, he was ill at ease with people and surrounded himself with yes-men. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 5367-69 | Added on Monday, 3 September 18 07:48:55 Greenwich Mean Time In 1930, however, in the wake of the crash, banks had begun carrying larger cash balances as a precaution against further disasters, and excess bank reserves were more a symptom of how gun-shy banks had become and less how easy the Fed had been. ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 145-46 | Added on Monday, 3 September 18 12:20:43 Greenwich Mean Time together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 5717-18 | Added on Tuesday, 4 September 18 12:15:25 Greenwich Mean Time Seventy percent of the city’s deposits were frozen, retail business came to a standstill, and even the Inverness Golf Club, scene of the most recent U.S. Open, was closed. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 5728-30 | Added on Tuesday, 4 September 18 12:17:22 Greenwich Mean Time Determined to follow Bagehot’s rule of only lending to “sound” institutions and believing that propping up failing banks would be throwing good money after bad, the regional governors made it a principle to let them go under. They failed to recognize that by doing so they were undermining public confidence in banks as a repository of savings and were causing the U.S. credit system to freeze up. ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 238-40 | Added on Tuesday, 4 September 18 13:59:24 Greenwich Mean Time Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.12 That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 6205-6 | Added on Thursday, 6 September 18 06:41:25 Greenwich Mean Time the City had to finance its long-term loans by relying more and more on short-term deposits. While everyone was dimly aware of this growing mismatch between liabilities and assets, no one had any idea of its magnitude. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 6406-8 | Added on Thursday, 6 September 18 20:02:05 Greenwich Mean Time So dominant was the view that abiding by these reserve requirements trumped every other consideration, there was no internal resistance at the Fed to jacking up the cost of credit. Even the two principal expansionists, Meyer and Harrison, went along. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 6433 | Added on Thursday, 6 September 18 20:10:05 Greenwich Mean Time The currency and banking convulsions of 1931 changed the nature of the economic collapse. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 6513-14 | Added on Thursday, 6 September 18 20:28:27 Greenwich Mean Time During February and the first few days of March, close to $2 billion, a third of all the currency in the country, was withdrawn from banks. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 6730-31 | Added on Friday, 7 September 18 07:04:13 Greenwich Mean Time in an economy where everything is connected, there is often no clear distinction between cause and effect. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 7198-7200 | Added on Saturday, 8 September 18 06:17:40 Greenwich Mean Time After losing 80 percent of his money when commodity prices collapsed after 1928, he had ended 1929 with a portfolio of under $40,000. He shifted his strategy from short-term speculation to long-term investment and at the lows of the Depression put together a concentrated portfolio of a select number of British and American equities. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 7247-50 | Added on Saturday, 8 September 18 06:28:15 Greenwich Mean Time Keynes also wanted to introduce a mechanism for disciplining countries that unfairly cheapened their currencies and accumulated excessive amounts of the world’s reserves without recycling them, as France had done in the twenties and thirties. But the United States, fearing that in the aftermath of the war it might find itself flooded with gold, and thus be accused of underpricing its currency, would not agree. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 7373-75 | Added on Saturday, 8 September 18 16:08:56 Greenwich Mean Time The U.S. stock market bubble thus had a double effect. On the way up, it created a squeeze in international credit that drove Germany and other parts of the world into recession. And on the way down, it shook the U.S. economy. ========== Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (Liaquat Ahamed) - Highlight Loc. 7385 | Added on Saturday, 8 September 18 17:18:35 Greenwich Mean Time most basic central banker’s responsibility: to act as lender of last resort and support the banking system at a time of panic. ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 1119-20 | Added on Monday, 15 October 18 05:39:30 Greenwich Mean Time If you are a tree, slow growth is the key to growing old. Growth fueled by hefty additions of excess nitrogen from agricultural operations is unhealthy. And so the tried and tested rule holds true: less (carbon dioxide) is more (life-span). ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 1225-28 | Added on Wednesday, 17 October 18 06:08:31 Greenwich Mean Time The forest floor acts as a huge sponge that diligently collects all the rainfall. The trees make sure that the raindrops don’t land heavily on the ground but drip gently from their branches. The loosely packed soil absorbs all the water, so instead of the raindrops joining together to form small streams that rush away in the blink of an eye, they remain trapped in the soil. ========== Bullshit Jobs: A theory (David Graeber) - Highlight Loc. 378-79 | Added on Thursday, 25 October 18 13:56:11 Greenwich Mean Time Socrates teaches us, when this happens—when our own definitions produce results that seem intuitively wrong to us—it’s because we’re not aware of what we really think. ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 2025-26 | Added on Saturday, 27 October 18 07:05:20 Greenwich Mean Time Birches rush through life, live beyond their means, and eventually wear themselves out. ========== The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 2479-81 | Added on Monday, 5 November 18 07:18:06 Greenwich Mean Time On the subject of sleep: have you ever considered whether this is something trees even need? What would happen if we wanted to help them, and so we provided them with light at night as well as during the day so that they could manufacture more sugar? According to current research, that would be a bad idea. It seems trees need their rest just as much as we do, and sleep deprivation is as detrimental to trees as it is to us. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 152-53 | Added on Wednesday, 7 November 18 06:14:21 Greenwich Mean Time It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 263-67 | Added on Wednesday, 7 November 18 06:38:21 Greenwich Mean Time When people try to achieve happiness on their own, without the support of a faith, they usually seek to maximize pleasures that are either biologically programmed in their genes or are out as attractive by the society in which they live. Wealth, power, and sex become the chief goals that give direction to their strivings. But the quality of life cannot be improved this way. Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 282-83 | Added on Thursday, 8 November 18 05:35:16 Greenwich Mean Time “The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly,” in the words of J. H. Holmes. “It is simply indifferent.” ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 309-10 | Added on Thursday, 8 November 18 05:52:57 Greenwich Mean Time most people are caught up on this frustrating treadmill of rising expectations, many individuals have found ways to escape it. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 193 | Added on Saturday, 24 November 18 12:45:56 Greenwich Mean Time All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us. ========== The Laws of Human Nature (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 571-73 | Added on Monday, 26 November 18 11:05:10 Greenwich Mean Time Animals feel fear for a brief time, then it is gone. We dwell on our fears, intensifying them and making them last well past the moment of danger, even to the point of feeling constant anxiety. ========== The Laws of Human Nature (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 717-18 | Added on Tuesday, 27 November 18 07:31:13 Greenwich Mean Time Our only defense is awareness as it is happening. We can recognize a trigger point by the experience of emotions that are unusually primal, more uncontrollable than normal. They trigger tears, deep depression, or excessive hope. ========== The Laws of Human Nature (Robert Greene) - Highlight Loc. 791-93 | Added on Tuesday, 27 November 18 07:55:46 Greenwich Mean Time the maker’s mind-set. We have a project to get done, perhaps with a deadline. The only emotion we can afford is excitement and energy. Other emotions simply make it impossible to concentrate. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 541-42 | Added on Tuesday, 27 November 18 09:38:05 Greenwich Mean Time Emotional hijackings presumably involve two dynamics: triggering of the amygdala and a failure to activate the neocortical processes that usually keep emotional response in balance—or a recruitment of the neocortical zones to the emotional urgency. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 567-69 | Added on Wednesday, 28 November 18 20:53:18 Greenwich Mean Time when we are emotionally upset we say we "just can't think straight"—and why continual emotional distress can create deficits in a child's intellectual abilities, crippling the capacity to learn. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 485-86 | Added on Friday, 30 November 18 09:57:34 Greenwich Mean Time But a person does not have to be turned into a puppet jerked about by social controls. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 693-94 | Added on Saturday, 1 December 18 07:26:12 Greenwich Mean Time Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 829-32 | Added on Sunday, 2 December 18 07:38:29 Greenwich Mean Time Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 2733-34 | Added on Thursday, 20 December 18 07:38:46 Greenwich Mean Time If flow, rather than success and recognition, is the measure by which to judge its value, science can contribute immensely to the quality of life. ========== Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) - Highlight Loc. 3995-97 | Added on Wednesday, 2 January 19 07:36:46 Greenwich Mean Time Achieving this unity with one’s surroundings is not only an important component of enjoyable flow experiences but is also a central mechanism by which adversity is conquered. In the first place, when attention is focused away from the self, frustrations of one’s desires have less of a chance to disrupt consciousness. ========== Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (Richard H. Thaler) - Highlight Loc. 352-53 | Added on Tuesday, 8 January 19 08:07:36 Greenwich Mean Time people valued things that were already part of their endowment more highly than things that could be part of their endowment, that were available but not yet owned. ========== Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (Richard H. Thaler) - Highlight Loc. 1416-17 | Added on Monday, 14 January 19 07:59:49 Greenwich Mean Time A good rule to remember is that people who are threatened with big losses and have a chance to break even will be unusually willing to take risks, even if they are normally quite risk averse. ========== Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (Richard H. Thaler) - Highlight Loc. 2153-60 | Added on Friday, 18 January 19 07:33:08 Greenwich Mean Time MAN: I was looking over my bank statement, and I am wondering . . . TELLER: Is that a question? MAN: What? Well, yes. TELLER: Questions are extra—six dollars. MAN: What?! TELLER: Nine dollars. ========== Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (Richard H. Thaler) - Highlight Loc. 2244-47 | Added on Friday, 18 January 19 07:47:32 Greenwich Mean Time “It is incredibly important for any business, no matter how great the demand, not to charge a customer more than the good or service is worth—even if the customer is willing to pay more.” He felt that even if someone was willing to pay $2,000 to eat at Next, that customer would leave feeling, “Yeah, that was great but it wasn’t worth $2,000.” ========== Make Your Bed (William H. Mcraven) - Highlight Loc. 291-94 | Added on Sunday, 20 January 19 01:30:03 Greenwich Mean Time Moki never regained the use of his legs. The crash left him paralyzed from the waist down with limited movement in his arms. For the past thirty-five years, Moki has been in a wheelchair. In all those years I never once heard him complain about his misfortune in life. Never once did I hear him ask, “Why me?” Never once did he display an ounce of pity for himself. ========== Make Your Bed (William H. Mcraven) - Highlight Loc. 445-47 | Added on Monday, 21 January 19 04:29:38 Greenwich Mean Time Life is a struggle and the potential for failure is ever present, but those who live in fear of failure, or hardship, or embarrassment will never achieve their potential. Without pushing your limits, without occasionally sliding down the rope headfirst, without daring greatly, you will never know what is truly possible in your life. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 1 Ethical and Professional Standards and Quantitative Methods (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1560-62 | Added on Sunday, 27 January 19 18:13:37 Greenwich Mean Time A code of ethics will communicate an organization’s values and the expected behavior of its members as well as provide guidance for decision making. A code of ethics may be further enhanced and clarified by the adoption of standards of conduct. ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 864-65 | Added on Tuesday, 29 January 19 05:57:27 Greenwich Mean Time Munger later came to realize that conversational gambits of that type were foolish and impeded his progress in life. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 573-75 | Added on Tuesday, 29 January 19 10:59:25 Greenwich Mean Time In contrast to this type of OTC liquidity, some exchange-traded derivatives have very little trading interest and thus relatively low liquidity. Liquidity is always driven by trading interest, which can be strong or weak in both types of markets. ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 1178-81 | Added on Wednesday, 30 January 19 06:36:44 Greenwich Mean Time Though Charlie was reticent about expressing his feelings verbally, Molly said it was clear that he has always felt deeply about his family. It's just that a show of feelings might be dangerous. "He probably feels that if he ever began, he would be overwhelmed by his emotions," ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 1215-18 | Added on Wednesday, 30 January 19 06:43:00 Greenwich Mean Time His friend Chuck Rickershauser told Charlie that when he first started out in the law, the correct path was explained to him by a senior partner. "You must always remember that your duty is to conduct yourself so that everyone appraises you no higher than the third smartest person in the room. The client must be made to appear smartest, with me the next smartest, and only after this should any wisdom seem to reside in you." ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 1225-27 | Added on Wednesday, 30 January 19 06:44:30 Greenwich Mean Time Charlie lived by principles he'd learned at his grandfather's kneefirst, the surest way of building a business is by concentrating on the work already on his desk, and second, by underspending his income and amassing a pile of cash that could be invested to build future wealth. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 784-85 | Added on Wednesday, 30 January 19 10:11:05 Greenwich Mean Time At any given time, the number of outstanding contracts is called the open interest . ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 845-47 | Added on Wednesday, 30 January 19 10:20:53 Greenwich Mean Time A swap is an over-the-counter derivative contract in which two parties agree to exchange a series of cash flows whereby one party pays a variable series that will be determined by an underlying asset or rate and the other party pays either (1) a variable series determined by a different underlying asset or rate or (2) a fixed series. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1176-79 | Added on Thursday, 31 January 19 11:33:41 Greenwich Mean Time An asset-backed security is a derivative contract in which a portfolio of debt instruments is assembled and claims are issued on the portfolio in the form of tranches, which have different priorities of claims on the payments made by the debt securities such that prepayments or credit losses are allocated to the most-junior tranches first and the most-senior tranches last. ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 1639-40 | Added on Friday, 1 February 19 13:10:32 Greenwich Mean Time "The basic concept of value to a private owner and being motivated when you're buying and selling securities by reference to intrinsic value instead of price momentum-I don't think that will ever be outdated," said Munger. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1511-12 | Added on Friday, 1 February 19 18:54:08 Greenwich Mean Time derivatives valuation is generally much easier when the underlying can be shorted. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1560-62 | Added on Friday, 1 February 19 19:02:40 Greenwich Mean Time Arbitrage is only a relative pricing method. It prices the two stocks in relation to each other but does not price either on the basis of its own fundamentals. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1602-4 | Added on Friday, 1 February 19 19:15:34 Greenwich Mean Time Throughout the derivatives component of the CFA curriculum, we will use the principle of arbitrage as a dominant theme and assume that arbitrage opportunities cannot exist for any significant length of time nor can any one investor consistently capture them. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 743-46 | Added on Sunday, 3 February 19 12:16:32 Greenwich Mean Time The ability to meet short-term obligations is generally referred to as liquidity , and the ability to meet long-term obligations is generally referred to as solvency . ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 5 Equity and Fixed Income (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 903 | Added on Thursday, 7 February 19 13:05:41 Greenwich Mean Time the required rates of return for securities vary by their risk characteristics, terms, and liquidity. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 5 Equity and Fixed Income (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1018-19 | Added on Thursday, 7 February 19 13:27:44 Greenwich Mean Time Securities that are sold to the public or that can be resold to the public are called issues. Companies and governments are the most common issuers. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 5 Equity and Fixed Income (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1026-27 | Added on Thursday, 7 February 19 13:28:54 Greenwich Mean Time Fixed-income securities with shorter maturities are called “notes,” those with longer maturities are called “bonds.” ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1321-24 | Added on Thursday, 7 February 19 15:48:58 Greenwich Mean Time note disclosures include information about the following (this is not an exhaustive list): financial instruments and risks arising from financial instruments, commitments and contingencies, legal proceedings, related-party transactions, subsequent events (i.e., events that occur after the balance sheet date), business acquisitions and disposals, and operating segments’ performance. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1838-39 | Added on Thursday, 7 February 19 17:08:41 Greenwich Mean Time standard-setting bodies set the standards and regulatory authorities recognise and enforce the standards. ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 3525-26 | Added on Saturday, 9 February 19 07:42:14 Greenwich Mean Time THERE ARE LESSONS TO BE learned from his personal career and from the development of Berkshire Hathaway, and they are learnable, as long as people don't confuse simplicity with ease, says Munger, though he doesn't think everyone will learn them. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 114-16 | Added on Saturday, 9 February 19 11:58:31 Greenwich Mean Time There’s a critical insight in all this for those of us who want to learn to be more influential. The best persuaders become the best through pre-suasion—the process of arranging for recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 4966-67 | Added on Saturday, 9 February 19 12:18:10 Greenwich Mean Time By first establishing similarity to an audience, even a boastful communicator increases trust and consequent persuasion ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 223-24 | Added on Saturday, 9 February 19 18:57:18 Greenwich Mean Time I’ve claimed that the six—reciprocation, liking, social proof, authority, scarcity, and consistency—represent certain psychological universals of persuasion; ========== B000U5KFIC EBOK (Janet Lowe) - Highlight Loc. 3798-99 | Added on Sunday, 10 February 19 09:55:45 Greenwich Mean Time Charlie says as you get older you tolerate more and more in your old friends and less and less in your new friends. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 535-36 | Added on Sunday, 10 February 19 10:52:33 Greenwich Mean Time Besides arranging for others to orient themselves toward messages and products, there are numerous other ways for communicators to get an audience to assign special attention and, consequently, special import to an idea or item. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 5106-7 | Added on Monday, 11 February 19 11:06:33 Greenwich Mean Time Financial investment options that get short-term media coverage jump in price immediately but then decline in value as media attention wanes over time ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 613-15 | Added on Monday, 11 February 19 11:08:53 Greenwich Mean Time This sensible system of focusing our limited attentional resources on what does indeed possess special import has an imperfection, though: we can be brought to the mistaken belief that something is important merely because we have been led by some irrelevant factor to give it our narrowed attention. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2501 | Added on Monday, 11 February 19 19:18:19 Greenwich Mean Time last-in, first-out is not allowed under IFRS) ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2477-78 | Added on Monday, 11 February 19 19:19:56 Greenwich Mean Time Three areas of conflict include valuation, standard-setting approach, and measurement. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 874-75 | Added on Tuesday, 12 February 19 10:05:15 Greenwich Mean Time presumed causality, especially when acquired through channeled attention, is a big deal for creating influence—big enough to account for patterns of human conduct that can range from perplexing to alarming. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 1100-1105 | Added on Tuesday, 12 February 19 12:49:13 Greenwich Mean Time In a real sense, then, channeled attention can make recipients more open to a message pre-suasively, before they process it. It’s a persuader’s dream, because very often the biggest challenge for a communicator is not in providing a meritorious case but in convincing recipients to devote their limited time and energy to considering its merits. Perceptions of issue importance and causality meet this challenge exquisitely. If captured attention does indeed provide pre-suasive leverage to a communicator, a related issue arises: Are there any features of information that don’t even require a communicator’s special efforts to draw attention to them because, by their nature, they draw attention to themselves? ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2754-55 | Added on Tuesday, 12 February 19 15:58:23 Greenwich Mean Time The enhancing characteristics identified are comparability, verifiability, timeliness, and understandability. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 3127-28 | Added on Tuesday, 12 February 19 16:37:45 Greenwich Mean Time Operating profit results from deducting operating expenses such as selling, general, administrative, and research and development expenses from gross profit. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 6 Derivatives and Alternative Investments (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2122-23 | Added on Tuesday, 12 February 19 19:07:40 Greenwich Mean Time The overall process of pricing derivatives by arbitrage and risk neutrality is called arbitrage-free pricing ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 2 Economics (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 624-25 | Added on Wednesday, 13 February 19 18:37:56 Greenwich Mean Time Elasticity is a general measure of how sensitive one variable is to any other variable, and it is expressed as the ratio of percentage changes in each variable: %∆ y/%∆ x. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 2 Economics (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 648-52 | Added on Wednesday, 13 February 19 18:41:26 Greenwich Mean Time when the magnitude (ignoring algebraic sign) of the own-price elasticity coefficient has a value of less than one, demand is said to be inelastic. When that magnitude is greater than one, demand is said to be elastic . And when the elasticity coefficient is equal to negative one, demand is said to be unit elastic , or unitary elastic. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 2 Economics (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 673-75 | Added on Wednesday, 13 February 19 18:48:59 Greenwich Mean Time quantity demanded is not at all sensitive to price, and we would say that demand is perfectly inelastic in that range. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 2 Economics (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 681-83 | Added on Wednesday, 13 February 19 18:53:33 Greenwich Mean Time demand curve facing a seller under conditions of perfect competition is perfectly elastic . ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 5359-60 | Added on Friday, 15 February 19 11:11:29 Greenwich Mean Time pointing out a persuader’s undue manipulative intent in a trial setting tends to render the persuader’s (otherwise convincing) message ineffective ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 2008-10 | Added on Sunday, 17 February 19 10:42:27 Greenwich Mean Time Much of his test-taking prowess, he was convinced, stemmed from the resultant combination of diminished fear and bolstered confidence: “You can’t think straight when you’re scared,” he reminded me, “plus, you’re much more persistent when you’re confident in your abilities.” ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 2476 | Added on Thursday, 21 February 19 17:33:37 Greenwich Mean Time people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 2618-19 | Added on Thursday, 21 February 19 19:24:51 Greenwich Mean Time Influence practitioners have frequently found the human tendency for consistency with one’s prior (pre-suasive) words and deeds to be of service. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 5953-55 | Added on Saturday, 23 February 19 07:41:47 Greenwich Mean Time The wisdom of having a good match between the emotional-versus-rational basis of an attitude and a persuasive argument can be seen in Clarkson, Tormala, and Rucker (2011), Drolet and Aaker, 2002), Mayer and Tormala (2010), and Sinaceur, Heath, and Cole (2005). ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 3066 | Added on Saturday, 23 February 19 07:42:47 Greenwich Mean Time “Anything too stupid to be spoken,” he asserted, “is sung.” ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 3455-56 | Added on Sunday, 24 February 19 17:36:29 Greenwich Mean Time we’ve seen that successful pre-suasion can occur when audience members’ attention is channeled temporarily to a psychological concept favorable to a follow-on message. ========== Pre-Suasion (Robert Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 3496-97 | Added on Sunday, 24 February 19 17:46:53 Greenwich Mean Time The implication for effective pre-suasion is plain: pre-suasive openers can produce dramatic, immediate shifts in people, but to turn those shifts into durable changes, it’s necessary to get commitments to them, usually in the form of related behavior. ========== Influence (Robert B. Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 949-51 | Added on Tuesday, 26 February 19 18:35:35 Greenwich Mean Time our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision. ========== Influence (Robert B. Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 987-89 | Added on Wednesday, 27 February 19 06:52:40 Greenwich Mean Time The person whose beliefs, words, and deeds don’t match may be seen as indecisive, confused, two-faced, or even mentally ill. On the other side, a high degree of consistency is normally associated with personal and intellectual strength. It is at the heart of logic, rationality, stability, and honesty. ========== Influence (Robert B. Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 1341-42 | Added on Sunday, 3 March 19 06:07:46 Greenwich Mean Time it is hardly surprising that people try to avoid the look of inconsistency. For appearances’ sake, then, the more public a stand, the more reluctant we will be to change it. ========== Influence (Robert B. Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 1463-65 | Added on Sunday, 3 March 19 09:34:54 Greenwich Mean Time “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.” ========== Influence (Robert B. Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 2616-17 | Added on Wednesday, 13 March 19 13:29:09 Greenwich Mean Time social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there. ========== Influence (Robert B. Cialdini) - Highlight Loc. 2967-68 | Added on Thursday, 14 March 19 12:34:08 Greenwich Mean Time There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2644-45 | Added on Thursday, 21 March 19 06:48:19 Greenwich Mean Time Which emotions a suspect will feel depends upon the personality of the suspect, the past relationship between suspect and lie catcher, and the suspect's expectations, ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2776-77 | Added on Thursday, 21 March 19 17:33:08 Greenwich Mean Time The Guilty Knowledge Test usually produces more believing-a-lie mistakes, while the Control Question Test produces more disbelieving-the-truth mistakes. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2801-3 | Added on Thursday, 21 March 19 17:52:59 Greenwich Mean Time using the criminal justice system outcomes, polygraph examinations may appear to have a high number of [disbelieving-the-truth mistakes] in the case of acquittals, or [believing-a-lie mistakes] in the case of dismissals.17 ========== Erich Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front (Max Gilbert) - Highlight Loc. 190-91 | Added on Saturday, 23 March 19 06:55:34 Greenwich Mean Time At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2901-4 | Added on Monday, 25 March 19 07:15:54 Greenwich Mean Time In chapter 8 I will explain what I call lie checking, and in the appendix (table 4) I list thirty-eight questions that can be asked about any lie in order to estimate the chances that it can be detected from either the polygraph or behavioral clues. One of my illustrations of lie checking is a detailed account of a murder suspect's polygraph exam. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 2913-15 | Added on Monday, 25 March 19 07:20:28 Greenwich Mean Time When a suspect's polygraph test suggests lying, this should not be regarded as an "adequate basis for conviction or even for proceeding with a prosecution. . . . a deceptive polygraph examination would simply be the cause for pursuing the investigation. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3536-37 | Added on Monday, 1 April 19 07:52:55 Greenwich Mean Time He could turn on charm or fury and could with great mastery impress or intimidate, inhibit, or falsify feelings and plans. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3683-84 | Added on Tuesday, 2 April 19 10:36:57 Greenwich Mean Time ("The Definition of a Lie," in Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. Naomi Quinn and Dorothy Holland ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3742-43 | Added on Tuesday, 2 April 19 12:02:24 Greenwich Mean Time It is not that all spousal deceits fail or that all business, criminal, or international deceits succeed. Failure or success depends upon the particulars of the lie, the liar, and the lie catcher. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3797-98 | Added on Tuesday, 2 April 19 12:16:05 Greenwich Mean Time If a n y t h i n g my academic credentials are a disadvantage w i t h these groups. T h e y demand real-life examples, that I confront their experience, meet their challenges, and give them something they can use the next day. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3895-96 | Added on Wednesday, 3 April 19 07:17:04 Greenwich Mean Time the accurate lie catchers mentioned using information from the face, voice, and body while the inaccurate ones only mentioned the w o r d s that w e r e spoken. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3989-92 | Added on Wednesday, 3 April 19 07:44:24 Greenwich Mean Time It is less risky to i n t e r p r e t a change in behavior than to i n t e r p r e t some behavioral feature which the person shows repeatedly. Poindexter did not often show speech hesitations, pauses, swallowing, or the like. T h e lie catcher must always look for changes in behavior, because of what I call the Brokaw H a z a r d in chapter 4 (page 91). We will not be misled by a person's idiosyncrasies if we focus on changes in behavior. ========== Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (Paul Ekman) - Highlight Loc. 3992-93 | Added on Wednesday, 3 April 19 07:44:48 Greenwich Mean Time W h e n the behavior changes occur in relation to a specific topic or question, that tells the lie catcher this could be a hot area to explore. ========== The Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) - Highlight Loc. 1154-55 | Added on Wednesday, 17 April 19 06:21:14 Greenwich Mean Time the use of nominees was prevalent on Wall Street, with big players using them to build stock positions in a company without alerting other investors. ========== The Oath of The Vayuputras (Amish) - Highlight Loc. 425-27 | Added on Wednesday, 17 April 19 07:07:36 Greenwich Mean Time ‘That gold was a mere palliative. Not for us, but for the Vayuputras. Its only purpose was to make them feel less guilty for the carnage being wrought upon us by the “great invention” that they protected.’ ========== The Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) - Highlight Loc. 3744-48 | Added on Wednesday, 24 April 19 07:35:26 Greenwich Mean Time Only two Strattonites had panicked and actually told the truth—admitting to using high-pressure sales tactics and such. And as a way of saying, “Thank you for your honesty!” the SEC had tossed them out of the securities industry. (After all, they had admitted wrongdoing under oath.) And what terrible fate had befallen the twelve who’d lied? Ah, such poetic justice! Every last one of them had walked away completely unscathed and was still working at Stratton Oakmont to this very day—smiling and dialing and ripping their clients’ eyeballs out. ========== The Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) - Highlight Loc. 4030-33 | Added on Thursday, 25 April 19 07:43:29 Greenwich Mean Time In the end, it all came down to brainwashing, which had two distinct aspects to it. The first aspect was to keep saying the same thing over and over to a captive audience. The second aspect was to make sure you were the only one saying anything. There could be no competing viewpoints. Of course, it made things much easier if what you were saying was exactly what your subjects wanted to hear, which at Stratton Oakmont had been the case. ========== The Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) - Highlight Loc. 5412-15 | Added on Friday, 26 April 19 19:13:14 Greenwich Mean Time “What the fuck are you talking about?” spat the Spitter. “I just wanna sell some fucking shoes! I couldn’t give two fucks about how you get them to the stores! And I don’t need any fucking spreadsheet to tell me that if I’m making shoes for twelve bucks and selling them for thirty bucks then I’m making fucking money! Jesus!” Now the Spitter headed directly toward me with two giant steps. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Steve smirking. ========== The Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) - Highlight Loc. 7231-33 | Added on Sunday, 28 April 19 08:59:09 Greenwich Mean Time I’d consumed forty-two grams of cocaine, sixty Ludes, thirty Xanax, fifteen Valium, ten Klonopin, 270 milligrams of morphine, ninety milligrams of Ambien, and Paxil and Prozac and Percocet and Pamelor and GHB and God only knew how much alcohol—I still knew more about getting around U.S. securities laws than almost any man on the planet. ========== Erich Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front (Max Gilbert) - Highlight Loc. 1481-83 | Added on Thursday, 2 May 19 06:56:40 Greenwich Mean Time I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. ========== Erich Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front (Max Gilbert) - Highlight Loc. 2619-20 | Added on Sunday, 5 May 19 07:53:22 Greenwich Mean Time All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings-greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims. ========== Erich Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front (Max Gilbert) - Highlight Loc. 2632 | Added on Sunday, 5 May 19 07:56:13 Greenwich Mean Time I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. ========== Relativity (Albert Einstein) - Highlight Loc. 201-2 | Added on Monday, 24 June 19 14:57:21 Greenwich Mean Time Modern particle accelerators confirm Einstein’s predictions more directly. They prolong the life of unstable subatomic particles by achieving speeds that stretch time for them. ========== Relativity (Albert Einstein) - Highlight Loc. 671-72 | Added on Wednesday, 26 June 19 13:50:23 Greenwich Mean Time Events which are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train, and vice versa (relativity of simultaneity). ========== Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends (Tim Sanders and Gene Stone) - Highlight Loc. 103-5 | Added on Wednesday, 26 June 19 19:10:16 Greenwich Mean Time ========== The Meaning of It All (Richard Phillips Feynman) - Highlight Loc. 208-10 | Added on Friday, 28 June 19 08:46:58 Greenwich Mean Time Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn, as in my example of “oomph,” then the proposition they state is almost meaningless, because you can explain almost anything by the assertion that things have a tendency to motility. ========== Relativity (Albert Einstein) - Highlight Loc. 862-65 | Added on Saturday, 29 June 19 18:18:55 Greenwich Mean Time Every general law of nature must be so constituted that it is transformed into a law of exactly the same form when, instead of the space-time variables x, y, z, t of the original coordinate system K, we introduce new space-time variables x1, y1, z1, t1 of a co-ordinate system K1. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 2 Economics (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1148-50 | Added on Thursday, 11 July 19 16:15:52 Greenwich Mean Time Economic depreciation is forward looking. It asks, What am I giving up if I use my resources to produce output in the coming period? Accounting depreciation is backward looking. It asks, How should I distribute the historical cost—that I have already paid—across units of output that I intend to produce this period? ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 3 Financial Reporting and Analysis (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 5175-77 | Added on Friday, 12 July 19 13:13:13 Greenwich Mean Time Under IFRS, if inventory that was written down in a previous period subsequently increases in value, the amount of the original write-down is reversed. Subsequent reversal of an inventory write-down is not permitted under US GAAP. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 4 Corporate Finance and Portfolio Management (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 1256-58 | Added on Saturday, 13 July 19 12:57:38 Greenwich Mean Time In common law systems, shareholders and creditors have the ability to appeal to a judge to rule against management actions and decisions that are not expressly forbidden by statute or code, whereas in civil law systems, this option is generally not possible. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 97-98 | Added on Wednesday, 17 July 19 18:59:50 Greenwich Mean Time Employing psychology, deceit, strategic power, and diplomacy as the fundamental arts of combat, Sun Tzu defeated numerous opponents and created a systematic treatise on war. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 279-80 | Added on Wednesday, 17 July 19 19:35:26 Greenwich Mean Time war requires a definite objective and a definite enemy. Terrorism is not war; it is an important tactic of war. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 378-81 | Added on Thursday, 18 July 19 06:44:33 Greenwich Mean Time All warfare is based on deception.   19. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 435-39 | Added on Thursday, 18 July 19 09:48:14 Greenwich Mean Time to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.   3. Thus the highest form of generalship is to baulk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 491-93 | Added on Thursday, 18 July 19 16:03:13 Greenwich Mean Time What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.   12. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 574-75 | Added on Thursday, 18 July 19 18:43:16 Greenwich Mean Time By discovering the enemy’s dispositions and remaining invisible ourselves, we can keep our forces concentrated, while the enemy’s must be divided. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 610-12 | Added on Thursday, 18 July 19 18:48:46 Greenwich Mean Time Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.   33. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 4 Corporate Finance and Portfolio Management (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 2119-22 | Added on Friday, 19 July 19 14:45:22 Greenwich Mean Time The fact that you earned 21.86 percent in Project A or 18.92 percent in Project B does not mean that you can reinvest future cash flows at those rates. (In fact, if you can reinvest future cash flows at 21.86 percent or 18.92 percent, these should have been used as your required rate of return instead of 10 percent.) Because the NPV criterion uses the most realistic discount rate—the opportunity cost of funds—the NPV criterion should be used for evaluating mutually exclusive projects. ========== The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science) (Richard Dawkins) - Highlight Loc. 291-92 | Added on Friday, 19 July 19 18:52:40 Greenwich Mean Time it is a poor advocate that leaps precipitately to his conclusion when the jury are sceptical. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 699-701 | Added on Thursday, 1 August 19 17:09:03 Greenwich Mean Time There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general: (1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction; (2) cowardice, which leads to capture; (3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults; (4) a delicacy of honour which is sensitive to shame; (5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 776-78 | Added on Thursday, 1 August 19 17:21:28 Greenwich Mean Time If soldiers are punished before they have grown attached to you, they will not prove submissive; and, unless submissive, they will be practically useless. If, when the soldiers have become attached to you, punishments are not enforced, they will still be useless. ========== The Art of War (Sun Tzu) - Highlight Loc. 779-80 | Added on Thursday, 1 August 19 17:21:46 Greenwich Mean Time soldiers must be treated in the first instance with humanity, but kept under control by means of iron discipline. This is a certain road to victory. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 297-98 | Added on Thursday, 8 August 19 18:34:18 Greenwich Mean Time It seems to me that to understand these early Greeks, it is better to think of them not as physicists or scientists or even philosophers, but as poets. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 474-76 | Added on Friday, 9 August 19 18:18:22 Greenwich Mean Time We still use some of this, for instance the Aristotelian classification of governments into monarchies, aristocracies, and not democracies but constitutional governments. But much of it seems pointless. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 635-36 | Added on Saturday, 10 August 19 10:59:18 Greenwich Mean Time doing scientific research to fill human needs has a wonderful way of forcing the scientist to stop versifying and to confront reality. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 901-2 | Added on Monday, 12 August 19 19:00:35 Greenwich Mean Time the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or skeptic to eternal flames. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 1909-12 | Added on Monday, 2 September 19 19:03:35 Greenwich Mean Time His reason is spelled out in another work, The Beginning of Sciences,17 in which he compared science to wine. Wine strengthens the body, but is nevertheless forbidden to Muslims. In the same way, astronomy and mathematics strengthen the mind, but “we nevertheless fear that one might be attracted through them to doctrines that are dangerous.” ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 3617-18 | Added on Saturday, 7 September 19 12:55:24 Greenwich Mean Time only such central forces produce motion on a conic section, that is, a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola; ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 3990-91 | Added on Sunday, 8 September 19 06:47:26 Greenwich Mean Time The new thing added by Maxwell was that, just as a changing magnetic field generates an electric field, so also a changing electric field generates a magnetic field. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 4000 | Added on Sunday, 8 September 19 06:48:26 Greenwich Mean Time Electricity and magnetism had thus been unified not only with each other, but also with optics. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 4056-57 | Added on Sunday, 8 September 19 07:06:01 Greenwich Mean Time This distinction between particles and fields began to be swept away in the 1930s, with the advent of quantum field theory. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 4057-59 | Added on Sunday, 8 September 19 07:06:37 Greenwich Mean Time Just as there is an electromagnetic field, whose energy and momentum are bundled in particles known as photons, so there is also an electron field, whose energy and momentum are bundled in electrons, and likewise for other types of elementary particles. ========== To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science (Steven Weinberg) - Highlight Loc. 4083-86 | Added on Sunday, 8 September 19 07:11:35 Greenwich Mean Time The Standard Model would have seemed unsatisfying to many natural philosophers from Thales to Newton. It is impersonal; there is no hint in it of human concerns like love or justice. No one who studies the Standard Model will be helped to be a better person, as Plato expected would follow from the study of astronomy. Also, contrary to what Aristotle expected of a physical theory, there is no element of purpose in the Standard Model. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 145-46 | Added on Thursday, 19 September 19 10:53:49 Greenwich Mean Time The oneness of all life is a truth that can be fully realized only when false notions of a separate self, whose destiny can be considered apart from the whole, are forever annihilated. ========== The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie) - Highlight Loc. 1746-47 | Added on Friday, 20 September 19 05:44:33 Greenwich Mean Time he is intelligent. But we must be more intelligent. We must be so intelligent that he does not suspect us of being intelligent at all.” ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 372-73 | Added on Friday, 20 September 19 18:59:23 Greenwich Mean Time The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. When he acts, he is translating every living moment in terms of the old. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 387-88 | Added on Friday, 20 September 19 19:05:27 Greenwich Mean Time To understand and live now, everything of yesterday must die. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 451-52 | Added on Friday, 20 September 19 19:26:40 Greenwich Mean Time Acceptance, denial and conviction prevent understanding. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 475-76 | Added on Saturday, 21 September 19 04:57:17 Greenwich Mean Time Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle toward a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 500-502 | Added on Saturday, 21 September 19 05:03:18 Greenwich Mean Time To meditate means to realize the imperturbability of one’s original nature. Surely, meditation can never be a process of concentration, because the highest form of thinking is negation. Negation is a state in which there is neither the positive nor its reaction as the negative. It is a state of complete emptiness. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 526-28 | Added on Saturday, 21 September 19 05:20:24 Greenwich Mean Time Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationships to man. He then becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 548-49 | Added on Sunday, 22 September 19 06:33:27 Greenwich Mean Time Byzantium survived for 1,123 years while the solidus became the longest‐serving sound currency in human history. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 639-43 | Added on Sunday, 22 September 19 07:00:50 Greenwich Mean Time domestic hard money was easy money for foreigners, and was being driven out by foreign hard money, which allowed foreigners to control and own increasing quantities of the capital and resources of China and India during the period. This is a historical lesson of immense significance, and should be kept in mind by anyone who thinks his refusal of Bitcoin means he doesn't have to deal with it. History shows it is not possible to insulate yourself from the consequences of others holding money that is harder than yours. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 623 | Added on Sunday, 22 September 19 11:38:00 Greenwich Mean Time If there is any secret, it is missed by seeking. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 928-29 | Added on Tuesday, 24 September 19 14:10:57 Greenwich Mean Time the problem was not the gold standard, but that post‐World War I governments had wanted to return to the gold standard at the pre‐World War I rates. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 990-92 | Added on Tuesday, 24 September 19 14:37:35 Greenwich Mean Time The notion that government management of the economy is necessary became the unquestioned starting point of all modern economic education, as can be gleaned from looking at any modern economics textbook, where government plays the same role that God plays in religious scriptures: an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent force that merely needs to identify problems to satisfactorily address them. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 1004-6 | Added on Tuesday, 24 September 19 14:41:04 Greenwich Mean Time The conclusion obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of money and economics is that the cause of the Great Crash of 1929 was the diversion away from the gold standard in the post‐WWI years, and that the deepening of the Depression was caused by government control and socialization of the economy in the Hoover and FDR years. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 1069-70 | Added on Tuesday, 24 September 19 19:00:10 Greenwich Mean Time International Monetary Fund, which acted as a global coordination body between central banks with the express aim of achieving stability of exchange rates and financial flows. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 1762 | Added on Thursday, 26 September 19 04:43:11 Greenwich Mean Time “Every election is an advanced auction on stolen goods.” ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 1901-4 | Added on Thursday, 26 September 19 05:45:25 Greenwich Mean Time counter.19 Only with unsound money could we have reached this artistic calamity where the two largest economic, military, and political behemoths in the world were actively promoting and funding tasteless trash picked by people whose artistic tastes qualify them for careers in Washington and Moscow spy agencies and bureaucracies. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 1922-24 | Added on Thursday, 26 September 19 05:49:46 Greenwich Mean Time there is perhaps no more fitting tribute to the value of modern art than the many janitors at art exhibits worldwide who, demonstrating admirable perceptiveness and dedication to their job, have repeatedly thrown expensive modern art installations into the dustbins to which they belong. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1311-15 | Added on Thursday, 26 September 19 18:36:04 Greenwich Mean Time Reaction time becomes longer under the following conditions: 1. Not trained in any type of system 2. Tiredness 3. Absentmindedness 4. Emotionally upset (i.e.: anger, fear, etc.) ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1363-66 | Added on Friday, 27 September 19 05:37:57 Greenwich Mean Time Aim at quick hitting and do not sacrifice speed for power. A terrific kick and a powerful punch depend on two things: (a) leverage, (b) timing. Timing is an integral part of leverage, but the reverse is not the case. One does not need strength or weight to hit hard. Timing a blow is the secret of powerful hitting. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 2584-86 | Added on Saturday, 28 September 19 06:41:05 Greenwich Mean Time A decline in the price level, or deflation as the Monetarists and Keynesians like to call it, would result in people hoarding their money, reducing their spending, causing increases in unemployment, causing a recession. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1623-24 | Added on Sunday, 29 September 19 06:17:36 Greenwich Mean Time In the process of attack, there are four basic methods that you will use often: leading, feinting, drawing and infighting. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 2911-14 | Added on Sunday, 29 September 19 18:30:56 Greenwich Mean Time Academia is another good example, where students pay ever‐more‐exorbitant fees to enter universities only to be taught by professors who spend very little time and effort on the teaching and mentoring of students, focusing most their time on publishing unreadable research to get government grants and climb the corporate academic ladder. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 3002-4 | Added on Sunday, 29 September 19 18:56:17 Greenwich Mean Time A major advantage in securing centralized credit is scale, as it appears quantitatively less risky to lend to large‐scale lenders. The larger the firm, the more predictable the formula for its success, the larger the collateral in case it fails, and the more secure bank bureaucrats feel when making loans according to central bank lending criteria. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 3476 | Added on Monday, 30 September 19 09:11:28 Greenwich Mean Time Bitcoin adopters value it more as a store of value than a medium of exchange, ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 4090-91 | Added on Tuesday, 1 October 19 05:21:55 Greenwich Mean Time On top of the block subsidy, the node that correctly solved the PoW also gets the transaction fees included by senders. The sum of the transaction fees and the block subsidy is the block reward. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 4289-90 | Added on Tuesday, 1 October 19 07:41:23 Greenwich Mean Time the altcoins which copy Bitcoin's incidental details but do not have its only important characteristic: immutability. ========== The Bitcoin Standard (Saifedean Ammous) - Highlight Loc. 4511-13 | Added on Tuesday, 1 October 19 09:34:51 Greenwich Mean Time If everyone is assumed dishonest, everyone must pay a large cost to commit transactions to the common record, and everyone will lose these costs if their fraud is detected. The economic incentives make dishonesty extremely expensive and highly unlikely to succeed. ========== Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Murray N. Rothbard) - Highlight Loc. 581-82 | Added on Wednesday, 2 October 19 05:37:11 Greenwich Mean Time Keynesian macroeconomics denied the efficacy of the price system altogether in coordinating the various sectors of an economy confronted with the “failure of aggregate demand.” ========== Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Murray N. Rothbard) - Highlight Loc. 583-85 | Added on Wednesday, 2 October 19 05:41:15 Greenwich Mean Time The neoclassical synthesis thus proclaimed that the price system worked efficiently to allocate scarce resources only if the government deftly employed fiscal and monetary policies to maintain a level of aggregate demand or total spending in the economy that was sufficient to absorb a full employment level of output. ========== Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Murray N. Rothbard) - Highlight Loc. 1865-66 | Added on Tuesday, 8 October 19 12:13:56 Greenwich Mean Time As the quantity of effort increases, however, the utility of the satisfactions provided by labor itself declines, and the utility of the successive units of the final product declines as well. ========== The Complete Book of Shaolin: Comprehensive Programme for Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Development (Wong Kiew Kit) - Highlight Loc. 599-600 | Added on Wednesday, 9 October 19 14:23:34 Greenwich Mean Time Health is not merely being free from illness, but includes enjoying our food, sleeping soundly, being amiable to all beings around us — even though some of them may get on our nerves, having mental freshness and experiencing inner peace. ========== The Complete Book of Shaolin: Comprehensive Programme for Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Development (Wong Kiew Kit) - Highlight Loc. 720 | Added on Wednesday, 9 October 19 14:47:55 Greenwich Mean Time “those who know, do; those who don’t, teach”, ========== The Complete Book of Shaolin: Comprehensive Programme for Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual Development (Wong Kiew Kit) - Highlight Loc. 794-95 | Added on Wednesday, 9 October 19 15:52:43 Greenwich Mean Time The great statesman of ancient Greece, Pericles, defined health as “that state of moral, mental, and physical well-being which enables a man to face any crisis in life with the utmost facility and grace”. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 457-58 | Added on Saturday, 12 October 19 06:03:12 Greenwich Mean Time After all, this business of journalism is about pure entertainment, not a search for truth, particularly when it comes to radio and television. The trick is to stay away from those who do not seem to know that they are just entertainers ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 606-7 | Added on Saturday, 12 October 19 19:01:15 Greenwich Mean Time Symbolism is the child of our inability and unwillingness to accept randomness; we give meaning to all manner of shapes; we detect human figures in inkblots. ========== The Complete Book of Tai Chi Chuan: A Comprehensive Guide to the Principles and Practice- Revised Edition (Wong Kiew Kit) - Highlight Loc. 864-65 | Added on Sunday, 13 October 19 19:11:12 Greenwich Mean Time Success makes no difference; Failure too makes no difference, Who is happy like a carefree saint? I am happy like a carefree saint. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 4482-84 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 06:36:20 Greenwich Mean Time The more aware you become, the more you shed from day to day what you have learned so that your mind is always fresh and uncontaminated by previous conditioning. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 4495-4502 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 06:37:45 Greenwich Mean Time The six diseases: 1. The desire for victory. 2. The desire to resort to technical cunning. 3. The desire to display all that has been learned. 4. The desire to awe the enemy. 5. The desire to play the passive role. 6. The desire to get rid of whatever disease one is affected by. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 4517-19 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 06:41:20 Greenwich Mean Time Seek not the cultivated innocence of a clever mind that wants to be innocent, but have rather that state of innocence where there is no denial or acceptance and the mind just sees what is. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 4572-74 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 06:50:40 Greenwich Mean Time The abiding stage is the point where the mind hesitates to abide. It attaches itself to an object and stops the flow. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 4604-5 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 06:55:20 Greenwich Mean Time the very people who are most self-dissatisfied, who crave most for a new identity, have the least self-awareness. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 4832 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 08:34:43 Greenwich Mean Time Bruce said, “self-knowledge is the basis for living life effectively,” ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 5155-57 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 11:38:46 Greenwich Mean Time Tao of Jeet Kune Do is the intelligent martial artist’s tool kit. The tools themselves do not form a style but instead are to be used to create the individual’s style. ========== 2019 CFA Program Level I Volume 5 Equity and Fixed Income (CFA Institute) - Highlight Loc. 10862-64 | Added on Tuesday, 15 October 19 18:01:55 Greenwich Mean Time If the dealer is borrowing cash from a counterparty and providing securities as collateral, the transaction is termed a repurchase agreement. If the dealer is borrowing securities and lending cash to the counterparty, the transaction is termed a reverse repurchase agreement. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 1227-29 | Added on Thursday, 17 October 19 12:42:18 Greenwich Mean Time journalism may be the greatest plague we face today—as the world becomes more and more complicated and our minds are trained for more and more simplification. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 1299 | Added on Friday, 18 October 19 05:49:26 Greenwich Mean Time Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 1916-17 | Added on Sunday, 20 October 19 06:55:13 Greenwich Mean Time economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 2613-15 | Added on Monday, 21 October 19 07:24:19 Greenwich Mean Time Induction is going from plenty of particulars to the general. It is very handy, as the general takes much less room in one’s memory than a collection of particulars. The effect of such compression is the reduction in the degree of detected randomness. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 3155-56 | Added on Tuesday, 22 October 19 06:54:30 Greenwich Mean Time I never said that every rich man is an idiot and every unsuccessful person unlucky, only that in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one’s judgment. It is safer. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 3274-78 | Added on Wednesday, 23 October 19 07:21:28 Greenwich Mean Time Imagine a donkey equally hungry and thirsty placed at exactly equal distance from sources of food and water. In such a framework, he would die of both thirst and hunger as he would be unable to decide which one to get to first. Now inject some randomness in the picture, by randomly nudging the donkey, causing him to get closer to one source, no matter which, and accordingly away from the other. The impasse would be instantly broken and our happy donkey will be either in turn well fed then well hydrated, or well hydrated then well fed. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 3504-5 | Added on Thursday, 24 October 19 05:57:48 Greenwich Mean Time affect heuristic: What emotions are elicited by events determine their probability in your mind. ========== Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) - Highlight Loc. 3951-52 | Added on Friday, 25 October 19 11:25:44 Greenwich Mean Time gambling to me is best defined as an activity where the agent gets a thrill when confronting a random outcome, regardless of whether he has the odds stacked in his favor or against him. ========== Permanent Record (Edward Snowden) - Highlight Loc. 2557 | Added on Monday, 28 October 19 07:27:47 Greenwich Mean Time Mass surveillance is now a never-ending census, substantially more dangerous than any questionnaire sent through the mail. ========== Permanent Record (Edward Snowden) - Highlight Loc. 2563-65 | Added on Monday, 28 October 19 07:29:52 Greenwich Mean Time Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching—as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files—for evidence of a suitable crime. ========== Permanent Record (Edward Snowden) - Highlight Loc. 2721 | Added on Monday, 28 October 19 11:10:31 Greenwich Mean Time a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal. ========== Permanent Record (Edward Snowden) - Highlight Loc. 2815-16 | Added on Monday, 28 October 19 12:23:55 Greenwich Mean Time After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon less against terror and more against liberty itself. ========== Permanent Record (Edward Snowden) - Highlight Loc. 2839-40 | Added on Monday, 28 October 19 12:34:41 Greenwich Mean Time in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people. ========== Permanent Record (Edward Snowden) - Highlight Loc. 3963-64 | Added on Wednesday, 30 October 19 06:36:09 Greenwich Mean Time Journalism, like documentary film, can only reveal so much. It’s interesting to think about what a medium is forced to omit, both by convention and technology. ========== Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 730-31 | Added on Sunday, 3 November 19 13:28:19 Greenwich Mean Time oppressive forces draw much of their strength from their ability to wield their power in secret. ========== Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 1309-10 | Added on Sunday, 3 November 19 18:59:26 Greenwich Mean Time we cannot realise the basic rights that underpin justice in a world of concealment, secrecy and lies. ========== Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 1536 | Added on Monday, 4 November 19 10:27:09 Greenwich Mean Time The whole system is rigged to punish people who have different ideas of how things should be done. ========== Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 1641-42 | Added on Monday, 4 November 19 10:48:57 Greenwich Mean Time What were the unfakeable metrics in modern journalism? They were sales, hits, take-up and exclusivity. ========== Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 2421-22 | Added on Tuesday, 5 November 19 06:31:01 Greenwich Mean Time You should always be careful of questioning people’s motives: you only reveal your own. ========== Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 2812-13 | Added on Monday, 11 November 19 07:17:29 Greenwich Mean Time Electron had never been particularly close to his sister. He viewed her as an unfeeling, shallow person--someone who simply skimmed along the surface of life. ========== Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 5816 | Added on Wednesday, 13 November 19 08:49:46 Greenwich Mean Time Anthrax defines power as the potential for real world impact. ========== Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 548-49 | Added on Friday, 15 November 19 16:40:24 Greenwich Mean Time The Four Horsemen of the Info-pocalypse: child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, and The War on Some Drugs. ========== Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 726-27 | Added on Friday, 15 November 19 18:08:24 Greenwich Mean Time We used to say with Facebook that the user is not actually the customer. The Facebook user is actually the product, and the real customer is the advertising companies. ========== Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 1008-10 | Added on Sunday, 17 November 19 06:26:21 Greenwich Mean Time The history of the human race and the history of culture is the history of copying thoughts, modifying and processing them further on, and if you call it stealing, then you’re like all the cynics. ========== The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (Charles Darwin) - Highlight Loc. 133-34 | Added on Thursday, 2 January 20 12:59:38 Greenwich Mean Time to my mind there are no advantages and many disadvantages in lectures compared with reading. ========== With Winning in Mind 3rd Ed. (Lanny Bassham) - Highlight Loc. 1168-70 | Added on Monday, 27 January 20 14:52:23 Greenwich Mean Time Fact is we need pressure. Half the fun of competing would be gone without it. We just need it in the right amount. I’ve spent years trying to understand the phenomenon so I can use it to my advantage. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Pressure is two things at the same time, anxiety and attention. ========== With Winning in Mind 3rd Ed. (Lanny Bassham) - Highlight Loc. 1927-28 | Added on Sunday, 9 February 20 13:40:08 Greenwich Mean Time We might become indecisive because we are new to the sport, ill-prepared for the event or overly-cautious in our planning. ========== With Winning in Mind 3rd Ed. (Lanny Bassham) - Highlight Loc. 1947-48 | Added on Sunday, 9 February 20 13:43:24 Greenwich Mean Time A cautious person carefully weighs options but the focus is on how best to accomplish the task. An indecisive person is worried about making the wrong decision. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1498-99 | Added on Thursday, 13 February 20 06:04:33 Greenwich Mean Time The right boundary for thinking about a problem rarely coincides with the boundary of an academic discipline, or with a political boundary. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1502-3 | Added on Thursday, 13 February 20 06:05:18 Greenwich Mean Time Ideally, we would have the mental flexibility to find the appropriate boundary for thinking about each new problem. We are rarely that flexible. We get attached to the boundaries our minds happen to be accustomed to. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1543-47 | Added on Thursday, 13 February 20 06:17:10 Greenwich Mean Time Economics evolved in a time when labor and capital were the most common limiting factors to production. Therefore, most economic production functions keep track only of these two factors (and sometimes technology). As the economy grows relative to the ecosystem, however, and the limiting factors shift to clean water, clean air, dump space, and acceptable forms of energy and raw materials, the traditional focus on only capital and labor becomes increasingly unhelpful. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1608-9 | Added on Friday, 14 February 20 05:44:32 Greenwich Mean Time When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential. To act only when a problem becomes obvious is to miss an important opportunity to solve the problem. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 2282-83 | Added on Sunday, 16 February 20 05:14:23 Greenwich Mean Time Electing Bill Clinton was definitely different from electing the elder George Bush, but not all that different, given that every president is plugged into the same political system. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 2702-3 | Added on Sunday, 16 February 20 17:52:27 Greenwich Mean Time You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information. ========== Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella H. Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 2879-80 | Added on Sunday, 16 February 20 18:32:33 Greenwich Mean Time Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct. ========== Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton) - Highlight Loc. 751-52 | Added on Saturday, 29 February 20 10:20:24 Greenwich Mean Time Apart from the substantive merits, the feeling of participation in the process is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether a negotiator accepts a proposal. ========== The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data (Pelican Books) (David Spiegelhalter) - Highlight Loc. 1170-71 | Added on Wednesday, 18 March 20 17:56:59 Greenwich Mean Time Mean-averages can be highly misleading when the raw data do not form a symmetric pattern around a central value but instead are skewed towards one side like the jelly-bean guesses, typically with a large group of standard cases but with a tail of a few either very high ========== The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data (Pelican Books) (David Spiegelhalter) - Highlight Loc. 1203-5 | Added on Wednesday, 18 March 20 18:06:05 Greenwich Mean Time the standard deviation is a widely used measure of spread. It is the most technically complex measure, but is only really appropriate for well-behaved symmetric data ========== The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data (Pelican Books) (David Spiegelhalter) - Highlight Loc. 1387-92 | Added on Wednesday, 18 March 20 18:25:23 Greenwich Mean Time Alberto Cairo has identified four common features of a good data visualization: It contains reliable information. The design has been chosen so that relevant patterns become noticeable. It is presented in an attractive manner, but appearance should not get in the way of honesty, clarity and depth. When appropriate, it is organized in a way that enables some exploration. ========== The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data (Pelican Books) (David Spiegelhalter) - Highlight Loc. 1659-60 | Added on Saturday, 21 March 20 16:36:07 Greenwich Mean Time Theory shows that the normal distribution can be expected to occur for phenomena that are driven by large numbers of small influences, for example a complex physical trait that is not influenced by just a few genes. ========== The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data (Pelican Books) (David Spiegelhalter) - Highlight Loc. 1688-90 | Added on Saturday, 21 March 20 16:43:59 Greenwich Mean Time her Z-score , which simply measures how many standard deviations a data-point is from the mean. ========== The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 6317-19 | Added on Friday, 27 March 20 10:47:19 Greenwich Mean Time As Antonio Gramsci observed, hegemony is not solely based on coercion. Instead, hegemony—understood as the institutionalized exercise of domination—is anchored by “consent”; it is about the ability of the dominant power to shape, through cultural and ideological instruments, the preferences and mindset of its subjects. ========== The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 6927-29 | Added on Saturday, 28 March 20 08:44:13 Greenwich Mean Time Both Democratic and Republican governments have emphasized security and corporate interests at the expense of human rights. Even the Carter and Clinton administrations continued to prioritize corporatism, despite their attention to human rights. So far, the same can be said of the Obama years. ========== The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire (Julian Assange) - Highlight Loc. 7589-90 | Added on Tuesday, 31 March 20 05:53:29 Greenwich Mean Time •   Play to our strength: We must emphasize that democracy, and a free trade approach that includes corporate social responsibility, provides lasting solutions; ========== The Valmiki Ramayana, Volume 1 (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 6399-6401 | Added on Tuesday, 31 March 20 19:01:34 Greenwich Mean Time (note) can be in seven tones—shadja, rishabha, gandhara, madhyama, panchama, dhaivat and nishada, commonly known as sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni. The three scales are udatta (high), anudatta (low) and svarita (accented). ========== Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Roger Fisher, William L. Ury and Bruce Patton) - Highlight Loc. 1156-57 | Added on Friday, 10 April 20 18:08:09 Greenwich Mean Time “Illustrative specificity” is the key concept. ========== The Inner Life of Animals (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 867-69 | Added on Saturday, 11 April 20 06:15:31 Greenwich Mean Time Their heartbeat slows from up to two hundred beats to only nine beats per minute, and they breathe only four times a minute instead of fifty. Dialed down like this, a hedgehog uses hardly any energy at all and can make it through to the next spring on its reserves. ========== The Inner Life of Animals (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 896-97 | Added on Saturday, 11 April 20 06:21:07 Greenwich Mean Time It has now been proven that animals can turn off the sensation of hunger. Hunger is, after all, a signal from the unconscious that it’s time to eat. ========== The Inner Life of Animals (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 1405-10 | Added on Wednesday, 22 April 20 17:12:20 Greenwich Mean Time they played classical music to the pigs. Don’t worry, the researchers weren’t trying to find out if pigs are fond of Bach. Rather, they got the pigs to connect the music to small rewards, such as chocolate-covered raisins hidden in the straw. Over time, the pigs in the experimental group came to associate music with particular emotions. And now things got interesting, for other pigs were added that had never heard such sounds and therefore had no idea what they meant. Despite this, they experienced the same emotions the musical pigs experienced. If the musical pigs were happy, the newcomers also played and jumped around; in contrast, if the musical pigs were so scared that they urinated on themselves, the newcomers caught the feeling and exhibited the same behavior. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 837-39 | Added on Monday, 27 April 20 16:21:16 Greenwich Mean Time The global distribution of wealth and opportunities is extremely skewed. The richest 20 percent of the world's population controls more than 80 percent of the world gross product and uses nearly 60 percent of world commercial energy. ========== The Secret Wisdom of Nature (Peter Wohlleben) - Highlight Loc. 389-95 | Added on Tuesday, 12 May 20 07:52:24 Greenwich Mean Time In undisturbed ancient forests, youngsters have to spend their first two hundred years waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade. As they struggle to put on a few feet, they develop wood that is incredibly dense. In modern managed forests today, seedlings grow without any parental shade to slow them down. They shoot up and form large growth rings even without a nutrient boost from added nitrogen. Consequently, their woody cells are much larger than normal and contain much more air, which makes them susceptible to fungi—after all, fungi like to breathe, too. A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old. This process is now accelerating rapidly because of the extra nutrients in the air. The trees are like extreme athletes who are already doped up on steroids and then have an extra dose jabbed into them for good measure. ========== Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy (Sadhguru) - Highlight Loc. 550-53 | Added on Monday, 25 May 20 06:52:46 Greenwich Mean Time If we were to distill the essence of his wisdom in a few lines, it would be just this. Up and down, good and bad, sacred and profane: these are all assumed. But inward and outward: this is the one context we are sure of, the one context we can work with. This is Adiyogi’s most significant contribution to humankind and it is a profound and enduring one: “The only way out is in.” ========== Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy (Sadhguru) - Highlight Loc. 770-74 | Added on Tuesday, 26 May 20 05:48:14 Greenwich Mean Time What most people forget is that the past exists within each one of us only as memory. Memory has no objective existence. It is not existential; it is purely psychological. If you retain your ability to respond, your memory of the past will become an empowering process. But if you are in a compulsive cycle of reactivity, memory distorts your perception of the present, and your thoughts, emotions, and actions become disproportionate to the stimulus. The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. ========== Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy (Sadhguru) - Highlight Loc. 994-97 | Added on Tuesday, 26 May 20 18:49:01 Greenwich Mean Time The science of yoga is, quite simply, the science of being in perfect alignment, in absolute harmony, in complete sync with existence. The many fluctuations of the outside world have their impact on each one of us. But yoga is the science of creating inner situations exactly the way you want them. When you fine-tune yourself to such a point where everything functions beautifully within you, naturally the best of your abilities will flow out of you. ========== I'll Make You an Offer You Can't Refuse: Insider Business Tips from a Former Mob Boss (Michael Franzese) - Highlight Loc. 1478-79 | Added on Tuesday, 9 June 20 05:37:02 Greenwich Mean Time Filling our young people with false hopes and unrealistic goals will end up being far more damaging to their self-esteem. We should encourage kids to explore their individual talents and develop those gifts into their future vocation. ========== Free as in Freedom (Sam Williams and Richard M. Stallman) - Highlight Loc. 1065-68 | Added on Monday, 6 July 20 08:18:50 Greenwich Mean Time “My name is Jehovah,” Stallman would say. “I have a secret plan to end injustice and suffering, but due to heavenly security reasons I can’t tell you the workings of my plan. I see the big picture and you don’t, and you know I’m good because I told you so. So put your faith in me and obey me without question. If you don’t obey, that means you’re evil, so I’ll put you on my enemies list and throw you in a pit where the Infernal Revenue Service will audit your taxes every year for all eternity.” ========== Free as in Freedom (Sam Williams and Richard M. Stallman) - Highlight Loc. 1279-81 | Added on Monday, 6 July 20 12:51:30 Greenwich Mean Time “I have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. I think the reason is that I was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there wasn’t anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads. It wouldn’t have made any difference. I’d still be just as rejected, so I didn’t try.” ========== Free as in Freedom (Sam Williams and Richard M. Stallman) - Highlight Loc. 2219-20 | Added on Tuesday, 7 July 20 17:07:10 Greenwich Mean Time Besides, they’ve written it in such a hard way to read, both to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it’s basically useless looking at the published information [in the patent] to learn anything anyway. ========== Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Richard M. Stallman) - Highlight Loc. 1732-35 | Added on Saturday, 11 July 20 07:57:57 Greenwich Mean Time The developers of GNU packages can transfer the copyright to the FSF, or they can keep it. The choice is theirs. If they have transferred the copyright to the FSF, the program is FSF-copyrighted GNU software, and the FSF can enforce its license. If they have kept the copyright, enforcing the license is their responsibility. ========== Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Richard M. Stallman) - Highlight Loc. 5465-66 | Added on Wednesday, 15 July 20 07:05:43 Greenwich Mean Time How to Win Friends and Influence People, advises that the most effective way to persuade someone to do something is to present arguments that appeal to his values. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1140-43 | Added on Thursday, 16 July 20 05:35:04 Greenwich Mean Time It is a well-documented fact that "organic" farmers need not be primitive or retreat to the agricultural methods and low productivity of 100 years ago. Most of them use high-yielding varieties, labor-saving machines, and sophisticated ecological methods of fertilization and pest control. Their yields tend to be equivalent to those of their chemical-using neighbors; their profits tend to be higher.23 ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 534 | Added on Monday, 20 July 20 19:25:11 Greenwich Mean Time But after ages alone in the dark Gollum’s heart was black, and treachery was in it. ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 1843-45 | Added on Thursday, 23 July 20 05:53:38 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Has Gandalf told you nothing?’ ‘Nothing about such creatures.’ ‘Then I think it is not for me to say more – lest terror should keep you from your journey. ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 1860-61 | Added on Thursday, 23 July 20 05:56:31 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. ========== 20yearsofKDE (Lydia Pintscher) - Highlight Loc. 1476-77 | Added on Sunday, 26 July 20 12:07:15 Greenwich Mean Time Users come for the features and the look, and they stay for the freedom and privacy aspects. ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 4944 | Added on Wednesday, 29 July 20 06:27:38 Greenwich Mean Time and those who shelter behind us give us praise, if ever they hear our name: much praise but little help. ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 5377 | Added on Wednesday, 29 July 20 08:16:39 Greenwich Mean Time For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. ========== The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 7183-84 | Added on Wednesday, 5 August 20 19:29:52 Greenwich Mean Time I am not a counsellor. You may learn something, and whether what you see be fair or evil, that may be profitable, and yet it may not. Seeing is both good and perilous. ========== The Two Towers (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 1250-51 | Added on Tuesday, 11 August 20 20:16:16 Greenwich Mean Time ‘I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment. ========== The Two Towers (J. R. R. Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 3266-73 | Added on Monday, 17 August 20 08:57:14 Greenwich Mean Time Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it. ========== I, the Citizen: Unraveling the Power of Citizen Engagement (R. Balasubramaniam) - Highlight Loc. 3493 | Added on Thursday, 1 October 20 06:45:40 Greenwich Mean Time democracy is all about constantly finding ways to negate elite-capture and respecting the last citizen’s voice. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1684-85 | Added on Friday, 2 October 20 14:35:50 Greenwich Mean Time The best ways to reduce these flows of waste are to increase the useful lifetimes of products and to reduce materials flows at their source. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1685-87 | Added on Friday, 2 October 20 14:37:50 Greenwich Mean Time Increasing product lifetime through better design, repair, and reuse (as, for example, in washing cups instead of using throwaways) is more effective than recycling, because it doesn't require crushing, grinding, melting, purifying, and refabricating recycled materials. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 1954-55 | Added on Monday, 5 October 20 19:01:38 Greenwich Mean Time The continued poverty of the majority of the planet's inhabitants and excessive consumption by the minority are the two major causes of environmental degradation. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 159-60 | Added on Tuesday, 6 October 20 19:41:27 Greenwich Mean Time The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 170-71 | Added on Tuesday, 6 October 20 19:42:44 Greenwich Mean Time Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 187-88 | Added on Tuesday, 6 October 20 19:44:31 Greenwich Mean Time Do not run away; let go. Do not seek, for it will come when least expected. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 270-72 | Added on Tuesday, 6 October 20 19:50:50 Greenwich Mean Time It is indeed difficult to see the situation simply—our minds are very complex—and it is easy to teach one to be skillful, but it is difficult to teach him his own attitude. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1191-92 | Added on Thursday, 8 October 20 06:25:37 Greenwich Mean Time Such instinctive blinking must be controlled in practice or else the opponent, if aware that the fighter closes his eyes when threatened, may provoke this reaction and utilize the moment of blindness for a hit or kick. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1284-89 | Added on Thursday, 8 October 20 06:41:34 Greenwich Mean Time Certain physical principles govern speed: shortened radius for quicker action, longer arc for imparting greater momentum, centering weight for speed in rotation and multiplying speed by sequential but concurrently overlapping movements. The question an individual athlete must answer is what kind of speed is most effective for his particular work method. Often, it’s not how fast it travels but how soon it gets there that counts. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1496-98 | Added on Friday, 9 October 20 09:17:28 Greenwich Mean Time It is not wise at all to attack without first having gained control of the opponent’s movement time or hand position. Thus, a smart fighter uses every means at his disposal, patiently and systematically, to draw the stop-hit. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1630-32 | Added on Friday, 9 October 20 13:41:57 Greenwich Mean Time Leading with the forward hand, guarding with the rear hand, while moving to the side, makes negligible any opening that ordinarily results from a straight forward lead with the hand. ========== Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2016 | Added on Saturday, 10 October 20 10:21:11 Greenwich Mean Time In all hand techniques, the hand moves first, preceding the foot. Keep this in mind—hand before foot—always. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 3389-93 | Added on Wednesday, 28 October 20 19:53:12 Greenwich Mean Time Finally, we want to return to the purposes to which technology and markets are put. They are simply tools. They have no more inherent wisdom or farsightedness or moderation or compassion than do the human bureaucracies that create them. The results they produce in the world depend upon who uses them and for what purposes. If they are used in pursuit of triviality, inequity, or violence, that is what they will produce. If they are asked to serve impossible goals, such as constant physical expansion on a finite planet, they will eventually fail. If they are called upon to serve feasible and sustainable goals, they can help bring about a sustainable society. ========== Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows) - Highlight Loc. 3470 | Added on Wednesday, 28 October 20 20:05:25 Greenwich Mean Time Used with no concept of limits, markets and technologies are instruments of overshoot. ========== Awakening Your Ikigai (Ken Mogi) - Highlight Loc. 577 | Added on Monday, 23 November 20 13:33:34 Greenwich Mean Time By relieving ourselves of the burden of the self, we can open up to the infinite universe of sensory pleasures. ========== Awakening Your Ikigai (Ken Mogi) - Highlight Loc. 1073-74 | Added on Wednesday, 25 November 20 04:54:17 Greenwich Mean Time ikigai is an adaptation to the environment, no matter what the nature of that environment might be. ========== Buddhist Philosophy (William Edelglass, Jay L. Garfield and William Edelgass) - Highlight Loc. 237-38 | Added on Wednesday, 2 December 20 18:52:56 Greenwich Mean Time in order to attain liberation, one must come to know this nature, in a direct and immediate way, and cease to be deceived by merely apparent reality. ========== No Place to Hide (Glenn Greenwald) - Highlight Loc. 206-7 | Added on Monday, 14 December 20 10:55:58 Greenwich Mean Time Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote. ========== Catching the Wolf of Wall Street (Jordan Belfort) - Highlight Loc. 899-901 | Added on Sunday, 27 December 20 07:40:01 Greenwich Mean Time Danny had been my right-hand man, which meant everything I said would be cross-checked for accuracy. I would have to be extremely careful with that; outright lies would have to be avoided. It would simply be too easy to get caught. Omissions of fact were my only hope. After all, withholding information could just as easily be a lapse of memory. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 514-17 | Added on Tuesday, 26 January 21 05:42:01 Greenwich Mean Time He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can neither rule nor manage them to his liking. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 521-22 | Added on Tuesday, 26 January 21 05:44:15 Greenwich Mean Time The worst that a prince may expect from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them; but from hostile nobles he has not only to fear abandonment, but also that they will rise against him; ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 580-82 | Added on Tuesday, 26 January 21 06:05:27 Greenwich Mean Time a powerful and courageous prince will overcome all such difficulties by giving at one time hope to his subjects that the evil will not be for long, at another time fear of the cruelty of the enemy, then preserving himself adroitly from those subjects who seem to him to be too bold. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 768-69 | Added on Thursday, 28 January 21 15:02:55 Greenwich Mean Time if he who rules a principality cannot recognize evils until they are upon him, he is not truly wise; and this insight is given to few. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 824-25 | Added on Thursday, 28 January 21 16:07:08 Greenwich Mean Time A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity, so that if fortune changes it may find him prepared to resist her blows. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 896-98 | Added on Thursday, 28 January 21 19:25:52 Greenwich Mean Time Nevertheless he ought to be slow to believe and to act, nor should he himself show fear, but proceed in a temperate manner with prudence and humanity, so that too much confidence may not make him incautious and too much distrust render him intolerable. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 905-6 | Added on Thursday, 28 January 21 19:28:01 Greenwich Mean Time love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 943-46 | Added on Thursday, 28 January 21 19:37:05 Greenwich Mean Time it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable. A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. Those who rely simply on the lion do not understand what they are about. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 956-59 | Added on Thursday, 28 January 21 19:39:29 Greenwich Mean Time it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 1281-83 | Added on Friday, 29 January 21 07:31:47 Greenwich Mean Time there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is good, the third is useless. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 1305-11 | Added on Friday, 29 January 21 09:37:51 Greenwich Mean Time Fra Luca, the man of affairs to Maximilian45, the present emperor, speaking of his majesty, said: He consulted with no one, yet never got his own way in anything. This arose because of his following a practice the opposite to the above; for the emperor is a secretive man — he does not communicate his designs to any one, nor does he receive opinions on them. But as in carrying them into effect they become revealed and known, they are at once obstructed by those men whom he has around him, and he, being pliant, is diverted from them. Hence it follows that those things he does one day he undoes the next, and no one ever understands what he wishes or intends to do, and no one can rely on his resolutions. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 1311-14 | Added on Friday, 29 January 21 09:38:24 Greenwich Mean Time A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he wishes and not when others wish; he ought rather to discourage every one from offering advice unless he asks it; but, however, he ought to be a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the things of which he inquired; also, on learning that any one, on any consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be felt. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 1366-68 | Added on Friday, 29 January 21 09:59:36 Greenwich Mean Time I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 1376-78 | Added on Friday, 29 January 21 10:02:26 Greenwich Mean Time having always prospered by acting in one way, he cannot be persuaded that it is well to leave it; and, therefore, the cautious man, when it is time to turn adventurous, does not know how to do it, hence he is ruined; but had he changed his conduct with the times fortune would not have changed. ========== Machiavelli: The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli) - Highlight Loc. 1415-17 | Added on Friday, 29 January 21 10:20:28 Greenwich Mean Time although they were great and wonderful men, yet they were men, and each one of them had no more opportunity than the present offers, for their enterprises were neither more just nor easier than this, nor was God more their friend than He is yours. ========== ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF A CIVIL SERVANT (Anil Swarup) - Highlight Loc. 594-96 | Added on Sunday, 14 February 21 07:05:16 Greenwich Mean Time The ‘honest-only’ bureaucrat stops being the prime instrument available with the State to execute plans and programmes. He smells a rat in every file. Hence, he brings execution to a grinding halt. Even for projects which do get delivered, it usually is too late to attain the desired impact. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 215-17 | Added on Tuesday, 23 February 21 12:07:22 Greenwich Mean Time “And I rejoice also that we are charitable and sweet-spirited to these jealous, small men who made it the business of their lives to try to pull us down because their vision did not extend beyond the ends of their noses.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 248-50 | Added on Tuesday, 23 February 21 12:27:11 Greenwich Mean Time “the poison tongue of this poison woman who seeks to poison the public with every endeavor . . . to cast suspicion on everything good, bad, or indifferent appertaining to a name which has thus far not been ruined by her shafts.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 286-87 | Added on Thursday, 25 February 21 18:03:30 Greenwich Mean Time Grandpa Godfrey was the first to establish in John D.’s mind an enduring equation between bonhomie and lax character, making the latter prefer the society of sober, tight-lipped men in full command of their emotions. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 464-65 | Added on Thursday, 25 February 21 18:51:43 Greenwich Mean Time He always possessed an unusual, self-protective capacity to suppress unpleasant memories and keep alive those things that fortified his resolve. ========== ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF A CIVIL SERVANT (Anil Swarup) - Highlight Loc. 2696-97 | Added on Thursday, 4 March 21 14:25:38 Greenwich Mean Time 5 Cs (Central Vigilance Commissioner, Central Bureau of Investigation, Comptroller and Auditor General, Chief Information Commissioner and Courts) ========== ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF A CIVIL SERVANT (Anil Swarup) - Highlight Loc. 3515-16 | Added on Monday, 15 March 21 19:19:07 Greenwich Mean Time For any idea to fructify and be sustainable in the government it has to be politically acceptable, socially desirable, technologically feasible, financially viable, administratively doable and judicially tenable. ========== ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF A CIVIL SERVANT (Anil Swarup) - Highlight Loc. 3585-88 | Added on Monday, 15 March 21 19:30:00 Greenwich Mean Time For some of those who led the movement, honesty became an end in itself rather than a tool to deliver efficiently. Thus emerged a set of officers who came to believe that only they were honest and the rest of the civil servants were dishonest. In order to preserve their ‘purity’, they refrained from making things happen. They were now in the business of hounding others on the presumption that in a dishonest world they were the only saviours. ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 586-87 | Added on Friday, 19 March 21 19:41:54 Greenwich Mean Time ‘ease of doing business’ metric, particularly in respect of the enforcement of contracts component, where India ranks 163 out of 190; ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 955-56 | Added on Thursday, 1 April 21 18:56:17 Greenwich Mean Time India’s agrarian economy is the source of around 17 per cent of its GDP, 11 per cent of its exports and provides livelihood to about half of its population. ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 957-59 | Added on Thursday, 1 April 21 18:57:30 Greenwich Mean Time Outstanding bank advances to agriculture and allied activities have risen from 20 per cent of the GDP originating in agriculture and allied activities in 2000/01 to about 52 per cent in 2017/18 (Chart 12.1), which is slightly higher than the economy-wide bank credit–GDP ratio. ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 965-69 | Added on Thursday, 1 April 21 19:00:30 Greenwich Mean Time Banks are required to lend 18 per cent of annual net bank credit or credit equivalent amounts of off-balance sheet exposures, whichever is higher, to agriculture.³ Under this carve-out, 8 per cent is prescribed for small and marginal farmers. The share of outstanding advances to agriculture and allied activities in total priority sector advances has increased from 32.5 per cent in 2000/01 to 43.2 per cent in 2016/17. Thus, without exaggeration, it is safe to say that financial flows to agriculture have been generous.⁴ ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 1001-3 | Added on Thursday, 1 April 21 19:08:04 Greenwich Mean Time The first major nationwide farm loan waiver was undertaken in 1990 and the cost to the national exchequer was around ₹100 billion, which works out to ₹506 billion at today’s prices using the GDP deflator. The second major waiver was under the Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief scheme of 2008 amounting to ₹520 billion (0.9 per cent of GDP) or ₹813 billion at current prices using the GDP deflator. ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 1005-7 | Added on Thursday, 1 April 21 19:08:28 Greenwich Mean Time Beginning with Tamil Nadu in 2016, domino effects have spread in 2017 to several states and the total cost of loan waivers announced amounts to around ₹1.3 trillion (0.8 per cent of GDP). ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 1034-35 | Added on Thursday, 1 April 21 19:12:42 Greenwich Mean Time Many elements of this optimal approach are well known - crop insurance, infrastructure, irrigation, technology-enabled productivity improvements and opening up the farm economy to market forces and open trade. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 797-98 | Added on Wednesday, 7 April 21 18:42:28 Greenwich Mean Time John D. Rockefeller drew strength by simplifying reality and strongly believed that excessive reflection upon unpleasant but unalterable events only weakened one’s resolve in the face of enemies. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 807-8 | Added on Wednesday, 7 April 21 18:48:39 Greenwich Mean Time This bred in him a reflexive habit of secrecy, a fear of the crowd, a deep contempt for idle chatter and loose tongues that lasted a lifetime. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1507-8 | Added on Saturday, 10 April 21 19:01:07 Greenwich Mean Time Rockefeller always felt uneasy about venting anger or making an egotistical show of protest, and he pretended to accept this demotion with equanimity. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1557-58 | Added on Saturday, 10 April 21 19:10:10 Greenwich Mean Time From the outset, Rockefeller had to wrestle with the demons of pride and greed. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1570-72 | Added on Saturday, 10 April 21 19:11:57 Greenwich Mean Time “I would go into an office and present my card and say to the man that I supposed his business connections were satisfactory, and that I did not wish to intrude upon him, but that I had a proposition that I myself believed in and believed it would be to his advantage, that I did not expect him to decide off hand but asked him to think it over and I would see him again about it. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1782-83 | Added on Sunday, 11 April 21 10:19:39 Greenwich Mean Time He had too much conceit, too much bull-headed English obstinacy and so little self-control. Was his own worst enemy.”7 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 1950-52 | Added on Sunday, 11 April 21 10:53:24 Greenwich Mean Time it probably acted as a catalyst that hastened Rockefeller’s break with the Clarks. This parting was vintage Rockefeller: He slowly and secretly laid the groundwork, then moved with electrifying speed to throw his adversaries off balance. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 49-52 | Added on Sunday, 11 April 21 19:08:00 Greenwich Mean Time What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world’s population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or move toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached absolute zero (even though both remain presumably out of reach). ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 138-40 | Added on Sunday, 11 April 21 19:27:57 Greenwich Mean Time The complementary line that the mental stage is really physical was taken, curiously enough, by Freud, who believed that physiology would eventually explain the workings of the mental apparatus. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2320-21 | Added on Monday, 12 April 21 07:28:23 Greenwich Mean Time He cleverly projected the image of a rising star whom bankers spurned at their peril. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2548-51 | Added on Monday, 12 April 21 09:16:48 Greenwich Mean Time We sent our card by the messenger, that Vanderbilt might know where to find our office later.”58 The point is worth underscoring: Twenty-nine-year-old John D. Rockefeller demanded that seventy-four-year-old Commodore Vanderbilt, the emperor of the railroad world, come to him. This refusal to truckle, bend, or bow to others, this insistence on dealing with other people on his own terms, time, and turf, distinguished Rockefeller throughout his career. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 312-14 | Added on Monday, 12 April 21 11:12:58 Greenwich Mean Time Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 468-69 | Added on Tuesday, 13 April 21 16:03:25 Greenwich Mean Time Freedom is a matter of contingencies of reinforcement, not of the feelings the contingencies generate. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 482-85 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 07:16:37 Greenwich Mean Time A third example is the practice of inviting prisoners to volunteer for possibly dangerous experiments—for example, on new drugs—in return for better living conditions or shortened sentences. Everyone would protest if the prisoners were forced to participate, but are they really free when positively reinforced, particularly when the condition to be improved or the sentence to be shortened has been imposed by the state? ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 507-9 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 07:23:30 Greenwich Mean Time benevolence is no guarantee against the misuse of power, and very few figures in the history of the struggle for freedom have shown Rousseau’s lack of concern. On the contrary, they have taken the extreme position that all control is wrong. In so doing they exemplify a behavioral process called generalization. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 531-33 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 07:30:10 Greenwich Mean Time It has been forced to brand all control as wrong and to misrepresent many of the advantages to be gained from a social environment. It is unprepared for the next step, which is not to free men from control but to analyze and change the kinds of control to which they are exposed. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 554-55 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 08:21:57 Greenwich Mean Time The amount of credit a person receives is related in a curious way to the visibility of the causes of his behavior. We withhold credit when the causes are conspicuous. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 577-78 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 08:46:05 Greenwich Mean Time “No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will.” ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 610-11 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 08:59:34 Greenwich Mean Time “A woman must have a pretext in giving herself to a man. What better than to appear to be yielding to force?” ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 616-17 | Added on Wednesday, 14 April 21 09:02:58 Greenwich Mean Time We resort to gentle admonition rather than punishment because conditioned reinforcers are less conspicuous than unconditioned, and avoidance more commendable than escape. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 713-16 | Added on Thursday, 15 April 21 09:42:14 Greenwich Mean Time A scientific conception seems demeaning because nothing is eventually left for which autonomous man can take credit. And as for admiration in the sense of wonderment, the behavior we admire is the behavior we cannot yet explain. Science naturally seeks a fuller explanation of that behavior; its goal is the destruction of mystery. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 744-46 | Added on Thursday, 15 April 21 09:50:42 Greenwich Mean Time People still control each other more often through censure or blame than commendation or praise, the military and the police remain the most powerful arms of government, communicants are still occasionally reminded of hellfire, and teachers have abandoned the birch rod only to replace it with more subtle forms of punishment. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 778-79 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 06:44:08 Greenwich Mean Time (Much behavior which appears irrational in the sense that it seems to have no positively reinforcing consequences may have the effect of displacing behavior which is subject to punishment.) ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 890-94 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 07:32:56 Greenwich Mean Time The assertion that “only a free man can be responsible for his conduct” has two meanings, depending upon whether we are interested in freedom or responsibility. If we want to say that people are responsible, we must do nothing to infringe their freedom, since if they are not free to act they cannot be held responsible. If we want to say they are free, we must hold them responsible for their behavior by maintaining punitive contingencies, since if they behaved in the same way under conspicuous nonpunitive contingencies, it would be clear that they were not free. Any move toward an environment in which men are automatically good threatens responsibility. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 916-17 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 07:39:07 Greenwich Mean Time The concept of responsibility is particularly weak when behavior is traced to genetic determiners. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 983-85 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 08:07:50 Greenwich Mean Time Nature if not God has created man in such a way that he can be controlled punitively. People quickly become skillful punishers (if not, thereby, skillful controllers), whereas alternative positive measures are not easily learned. The need for punishment seems to have the support of history, and alternative practices threaten the cherished values of freedom and dignity. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 990-92 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 08:11:00 Greenwich Mean Time Except when physically constrained, a person is least free or dignified when under the threat of punishment. We should expect that the literatures of freedom and dignity would oppose punitive techniques, but in fact they have acted to preserve them. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 2972-73 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 10:30:36 Greenwich Mean Time One of Rockefeller’s strengths in bargaining situations was that he figured out what he wanted and what the other party wanted and then crafted mutually advantageous terms. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3051-53 | Added on Friday, 16 April 21 19:25:12 Greenwich Mean Time By remaining silent in the face of criticism, he thought he would seem confident and secure in his integrity—in fact, he seemed guilty and arrogantly evasive. Throughout his career, Rockefeller endured abuse with so much equanimity that Flagler once shook his head and said, “John, you have a hide like a rhinoceros!”44 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3118-22 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 10:23:27 Greenwich Mean Time Colonel Oliver H. Payne— a Yale graduate, honored Civil War colonel, and son of politician Henry B. Payne—was extremely wealthy, lived in a Euclid Avenue mansion, and was descended from one of Cleveland’s founding families. (Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened Japan to commerce in 1854, came from a collateral branch of the family.) With an erect, military bearing and coolly formal manner, many people found the young bachelor pompous—Flagler dubbed him the “kin of God”—but Rockefeller always paid tribute to Payne as a stalwart and capable ally.57 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3182-84 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 10:44:45 Greenwich Mean Time Indeed, his papers are chock-full of lamentations about how he overpaid for properties. When it came to mergers, he didn’t fight for the last dollar and tried to conclude matters cordially. Since he aimed to convert competitors into members of his cartel and often retained the original owners, he preferred not to resort to naked intimidation. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3184-86 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 10:45:10 Greenwich Mean Time he and his colleagues weren’t “so short-sighted as to antagonize these very men whom they were eager to have come into a close and profitable relationship with them.”75 ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1007-9 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 11:48:52 Greenwich Mean Time THOSE WHO CHAMPION FREEDOM AND DIGNITY do not, of course, confine themselves to punitive measures, but they turn to alternatives with diffidence and timidity. Their concern for autonomous man commits them to only ineffective measures, several of which we may now examine. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1023-24 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 11:53:34 Greenwich Mean Time To refuse to control is to leave control not to the person himself, but to other parts of the social and non-social environments. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1033-34 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 11:56:15 Greenwich Mean Time The patient is not to be told how to behave more effectively or given directions for solving his problems; a solution is already within him and has only to be drawn out with the help of the midwife-therapist. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1037-39 | Added on Saturday, 17 April 21 11:58:29 Greenwich Mean Time Intellectual, therapeutic, and moral midwifery is scarcely easier than punitive control, because it demands rather subtle skills and concentrated attention, but it has its advantages. It seems to confer a strange power on the practitioner. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1079-82 | Added on Sunday, 18 April 21 08:48:03 Greenwich Mean Time BUILDING DEPENDENCE ON THINGS Jean-Jacques Rousseau was alert to the dangers of social control, and he thought it might be possible to avoid them by making a person dependent not on people but on things. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1123-27 | Added on Sunday, 18 April 21 08:57:49 Greenwich Mean Time We sometimes induce a man to behave by prompting him (for example, when he is not able to solve a problem), or by suggesting a course of action (for example, when he is at a loss as to what to do). Prompts, hints, and suggestions are all stimuli, usually but not always verbal, and they have the important property of exerting only partial control. No one responds to a prompt, hint, or suggestion unless he already has some tendency to behave in a given way. When the contingencies which explain the prevailing tendency are not identified, some part of the behavior can be attributed to the mind. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1192-94 | Added on Sunday, 18 April 21 09:47:47 Greenwich Mean Time The individual is “permitted” to decide the issue for himself simply in the sense that he will act because of consequences to which legal punishment is no longer to be added. A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1214-16 | Added on Sunday, 18 April 21 09:51:58 Greenwich Mean Time The fundamental mistake made by all those who choose weak methods of control is to assume that the balance of control is left to the individual, when in fact it is left to other conditions. The other conditions are often hard to see, but to continue to neglect them and to attribute their effects to autonomous man is to court disaster. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1306-7 | Added on Monday, 19 April 21 08:16:49 Greenwich Mean Time There is no important causal connection between the reinforcing effect of a stimulus and the feelings to which it gives rise. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1358-59 | Added on Tuesday, 20 April 21 08:32:05 Greenwich Mean Time When one person controls another aversively, there is no commensurate good, and positive reinforcers may also be used in such a way that the gains are far from equal. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1358-60 | Added on Tuesday, 20 April 21 08:38:41 Greenwich Mean Time When one person controls another aversively, there is no commensurate good, and positive reinforcers may also be used in such a way that the gains are far from equal. Nothing in the behavioral processes guarantees fair treatment, since the amount of behavior generated by a reinforcer depends upon the contingencies in which it appears. In an extreme case a person may be reinforced by others on a schedule which costs him his life. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1445-51 | Added on Tuesday, 20 April 21 16:03:01 Greenwich Mean Time The value or validity of the reinforcers used by other people and by organized agencies may be questioned: “Why should I seek the admiration or avoid the censure of my fellow men?” “What can my government—or any government—really do to me?” “Can a church actually determine whether I am to be eternally damned or blessed?” “What is so wonderful about money—do I need all the things it buys?” “Why should I study the things set forth in a college catalogue?” In short, “Why should I behave ‘for the good of others’?” When the control exercised by others is thus evaded or destroyed, only the personal reinforcers are left. The individual turns to immediate gratification, possibly through sex or drugs. If he does not need to do much to find food, shelter, and safety, little behavior will be generated. His condition is then described by saying that he is suffering from a lack of values. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1522-23 | Added on Thursday, 22 April 21 05:41:31 Greenwich Mean Time In Dante’s hell, he will suffer the special tortures of those who “lived without blame and without praise,” like the “angels who were … for themselves.” To be for oneself is to be almost nothing. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1624-25 | Added on Thursday, 22 April 21 06:22:53 Greenwich Mean Time the social environment which is a culture is often hard to identify. It is constantly changing, it lacks substance, and it is easily confused with the people who maintain the environment and are affected by it. ========== Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Gary Wilson) - Highlight Loc. 88-91 | Added on Thursday, 22 April 21 07:42:36 Greenwich Mean Time the ventral striatum is not merely activated by drugs of abuse or stimuli whose associations with reward were hard wired into our brains long ago by evolution. The ventral striatum is strongly connected to and modulated by regions involved in social processing, and it is strongly triggered by rewards which depend on social context. For instance, stimuli which signal financial gains and increase in social status also activate the ventral striatum. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1641-42 | Added on Thursday, 22 April 21 11:12:38 Greenwich Mean Time A culture evolves when new practices further the survival of those who practice them. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1673-74 | Added on Thursday, 22 April 21 11:19:54 Greenwich Mean Time The simple fact is that a culture which for any reason induces its members to work for its survival, or for the survival of some of its practices, is more likely to survive. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1773-74 | Added on Thursday, 22 April 21 12:50:48 Greenwich Mean Time A culture which for any reason induces its members to work for its survival is more likely to survive. It is a matter of the good of the culture, not of the individual. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1811-12 | Added on Friday, 23 April 21 05:52:27 Greenwich Mean Time it is the contingencies which must be changed if his behavior is to be changed. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1878-79 | Added on Friday, 23 April 21 14:40:20 Greenwich Mean Time A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 1918-19 | Added on Friday, 23 April 21 19:03:27 Greenwich Mean Time A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2000-2001 | Added on Friday, 23 April 21 19:21:05 Greenwich Mean Time The only hope is planned diversification, in which the importance of variety is recognized. The breeding of plants and animals moves toward uniformity when uniformity is important (as in simplifying agriculture or animal husbandry), but it also requires planned diversity. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2074-75 | Added on Saturday, 24 April 21 07:50:14 Greenwich Mean Time To prevent the misuse of controlling power, however, we must look not at the controller himself but at the contingencies under which he engages in control. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3467-68 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 05:18:22 Greenwich Mean Time Standard Oil weathered the six-year depression magnificently, a fact Rockefeller attributed to its conservative financial policy and unparalleled access to bank credit and investor cash. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3494 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 05:24:37 Greenwich Mean Time Rockefeller didn’t apply this pressure lightly and preferred patience and reason—if possible—to terror. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3690-93 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 08:32:47 Greenwich Mean Time Had oil been found in scattered places after the Civil War, it’s unlikely that even Standard Oil could have mustered the resources to control it so thoroughly. It was the confinement of oil to a desolate corner of northwest Pennsylvania that made it susceptible to monopoly control, especially with the emergence of pipelines. Pipelines unified the Pennsylvania wells into a single network and ultimately permitted Standard Oil to start or stop the flow of oil with the turn of a spigot. In time, they relegated collaboration with the railroads into something of a sideshow for Rockefeller. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2122-24 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 10:50:07 Greenwich Mean Time Rules never generate behavior exactly appropriate to the contingencies from which they are derived, and the discrepancy grows worse if the contingencies change while the rules remain inviolate. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2184 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 11:04:36 Greenwich Mean Time But the more rapidly an organism learns, the more vulnerable it is to adventitious contingencies. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2185-86 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 11:05:24 Greenwich Mean Time result superstitious. So far as we know, any species capable of learning from a few reinforcements is subject to superstition, and the consequences are often disastrous. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2228-30 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 18:40:15 Greenwich Mean Time Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are basic rights. But they are the rights of the individual and were listed as such at a time when the literatures of freedom and dignity were concerned with the aggrandizement of the individual. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2239-42 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 18:51:39 Greenwich Mean Time Attacking controlling practices is, of course, a form of countercontrol. It may have immeasurable benefits if better controlling practices are thereby selected. But the literatures of freedom and dignity have made the mistake of supposing that they are suppressing control rather than correcting it. The reciprocal control through which a culture evolves is then disturbed. To refuse to exercise available control because in some sense all control is wrong is to withhold possibly important forms of countercontrol. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2245-50 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 18:53:53 Greenwich Mean Time This could be a lethal cultural mutation. Our culture has produced the science and technology it needs to save itself. It has the wealth needed for effective action. It has, to a considerable extent, a concern for its own future. But if it continues to take freedom or dignity, rather than its own survival, as its principal value, then it is possible that some other culture will make a greater contribution to the future. The defender of freedom and dignity may then, like Milton’s Satan, continue to tell himself that he has “a mind not to be changed by place or time” and an all-sufficient personal identity (“What matter where, if I be still the same?”), but he will nevertheless find himself in hell with no other consolation than the illusion that “here at least we shall be free.” ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2261-64 | Added on Sunday, 25 April 21 18:59:12 Greenwich Mean Time All control is reciprocal, and an interchange between control and countercontrol is essential to the evolution of a culture. The interchange is disturbed by the literatures of freedom and dignity, which interpret countercontrol as the suppression rather than the correction of controlling practices. The effect could be lethal. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2298-2300 | Added on Monday, 26 April 21 11:15:33 Greenwich Mean Time A third example, a “cognitive” activity, is attention. A person responds only to a small part of the stimuli impinging upon him. The traditional view is that he himself determines which stimuli are to be effective by “paying attention” to them. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2379-83 | Added on Monday, 26 April 21 11:49:41 Greenwich Mean Time Awareness may help if the problem is in part a lack of awareness, and “insight” into one’s condition may help if one then takes remedial action, but awareness or insight alone is not always enough, and it may be too much. One need not be aware of one’s behavior or the conditions controlling it in order to behave effectively—or ineffectively. On the contrary, as the toad’s inquiry of the centipede demonstrates, constant self-observation may be a handicap. The accomplished pianist would perform badly if he were as clearly aware of his behavior as the student who is just learning to play. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2386 | Added on Monday, 26 April 21 11:50:22 Greenwich Mean Time The extent to which a man should be aware of himself depends upon the importance of self-observation for effective behavior. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2471-72 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 06:10:38 Greenwich Mean Time The controlling self generally represents the interests of others, the controlled self the interests of the individual. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2491-94 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 06:17:44 Greenwich Mean Time Krutch has argued that whereas the traditional view supports Hamlet’s exclamation, “How like a god!,” Pavlov, the behavioral scientist, emphasized “How like a dog!” But that was a step forward. A god is the archetypal pattern of an explanatory fiction, of a miracle-working mind, of the metaphysical. Man is much more than a dog, but like a dog he is within range of a scientific analysis. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2510-13 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 06:25:35 Greenwich Mean Time A person may respond to very small things with the help of an electron microscope and to very large things with radiotelescopes, and in doing so he may seem quite inhuman to those who use only their unaided senses. A person may act upon the environment with the delicate precision of a micromanipulator or with the range and power of a space rocket, and his behavior may seem inhuman to those who rely only on muscular contractions. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2541-42 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 06:32:21 Greenwich Mean Time There is a difference between biological and individual purpose in that the latter can be felt. No one could have felt the purpose in the development of the human hand, whereas a person can in a sense feel the purpose with which he plays a smooth scale. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 4125-28 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 09:40:13 Greenwich Mean Time word used is kripa, which means pity or compassion. Daya also translates as pity or compassion, but there is a difference between kripa and daya. If daya is the passion, one tries to do something actively to remove the reason for pity or compassion. That is, daya is the path of the strong. Kripa is passive, without the necessary action and is the path of the weak. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 781-82 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 09:45:18 Greenwich Mean Time ‘You speak as if you are wise, but you are grieving over those that one should not sorrow over. The wise don’t sorrow over those who are dead or those who are alive. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 862-63 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 09:59:11 Greenwich Mean Time ‘O descendant of Bharata!27 In everyone’s body, the atman is indestructible. Therefore, you should not mourn about any being. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 905-6 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:02:18 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Therefore, get ready to fight, looking upon happiness and unhappiness, gain and loss and victory and defeat equally. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 936-38 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:11:11 Greenwich Mean Time Do not be bothered about that which is yet to be attained42 or preserving what has already been attained. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 941-42 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:12:40 Greenwich Mean Time ‘You have the right to action alone. You never have the right to the fruit. Do not be motivated to act because of the fruit. But don’t be motivated to not acting either. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 963-64 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:16:09 Greenwich Mean Time ‘He who has this wisdom discards good action and evil action in this life itself. Therefore, use yoga in what you do. Yoga is the skill of action. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 966-67 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:18:19 Greenwich Mean Time you will attain indifference between that which has already been heard and that which is yet to be heard. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 4191 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:18:58 Greenwich Mean Time samadhi, union between the human and the divine. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1003-4 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:22:56 Greenwich Mean Time ‘If a man thinks about sensual objects, this gives birth to attachment for them.57 From attachment is created desire and desire gives birth to anger. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1047-48 | Added on Tuesday, 27 April 21 10:27:15 Greenwich Mean Time ‘A man who gives up all desire and exists without longing, without ego and without a sense of ownership, he attains peace. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2657-64 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 06:07:53 Greenwich Mean Time It is hard to imagine a world in which people live together without quarreling, maintain themselves by producing the food, shelter, and clothing they need, enjoy themselves and contribute to the enjoyment of others in art, music, literature, and games, consume only a reasonable part of the resources of the world and add as little as possible to its pollution, bear no more children than can be raised decently, continue to explore the world around them and discover better ways of dealing with it, and come to know themselves accurately and, therefore, manage themselves effectively. Yet all this is possible, and even the slightest sign of progress should bring a kind of change which in traditional terms would be said to assuage wounded vanity, offset a sense of hopelessness or nostalgia, correct the impression that “we neither can nor need to do anything for ourselves,” and promote a “sense of freedom and dignity” by building “a sense of confidence and worth.” In other words, it should abundantly reinforce those who have been induced by their culture to work for its survival. ========== Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) - Highlight Loc. 2665-71 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 06:10:50 Greenwich Mean Time An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment—an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then “abolished”? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1174-76 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 06:36:43 Greenwich Mean Time ‘O descendant of Bharata!28 Ignorant people perform action by being attached to that action. But the wise perform similar action unattached, for the welfare and preservation of the worlds. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1213-15 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 06:41:53 Greenwich Mean Time ‘One’s own dharma, even if followed imperfectly, is superior to someone else’s dharma, even if followed perfectly. It is better to be slain while following one’s own dharma. Someone else’s dharma is tinged with fear.’ ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3737-40 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 08:48:19 Greenwich Mean Time Rockefeller equated silence with strength: Weak men had loose tongues and blabbed to reporters, while prudent businessmen kept their own counsel. Two of his most cherished maxims were “Success comes from keeping the ears open and the mouth closed” and “A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.”7 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3742-44 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 08:50:10 Greenwich Mean Time When angry, he tended to grow eerily quiet. He liked to tell how a blustering contractor stormed into his office and launched into a snarling tirade against him while he sat hunched over his writing desk and didn’t look up until the man had exhausted himself. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3748-50 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 08:51:14 Greenwich Mean Time “Do not many of us who fail to achieve big things . . . fail because we lack concentration—the art of concentrating the mind on the thing to be done at the proper time and to the exclusion of everything else?”9 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3778-80 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 08:56:40 Greenwich Mean Time “Rockefeller was never a great talker; that he was not liked by his fellows; that everybody was afraid of him; and that he was solitary.”14 But Rockefeller never turned the ferocity that he trained against rivals against his own employees and people who worked for him usually found him a model of propriety and paternalistic concern. As ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3788-90 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 08:59:45 Greenwich Mean Time “The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee,” he once said, “and I pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.”17 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3817-18 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 09:07:08 Greenwich Mean Time At first, he tested them exhaustively, yet once he trusted them, he bestowed enormous power upon them and didn’t intrude unless something radically misfired. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 3910 | Added on Wednesday, 28 April 21 09:24:26 Greenwich Mean Time Standard Oil was never kind to skeptics who doubted its bright future. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1457-58 | Added on Thursday, 29 April 21 06:15:57 Greenwich Mean Time ‘The ignorant, the faithless and the doubting are destroyed. For the doubting person, this world, other worlds and happiness don’t exist. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1533-34 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 10:19:59 Greenwich Mean Time Those who do not follow yoga and are attached to fruits because of desire remain in bondage. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1567-69 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 10:26:43 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Established in the brahman, such a person learned in the brahman is poised in intellect and is without delusion, not delighted at receiving something pleasant, or agitated at receiving something unpleasant. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1593-95 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 10:28:26 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Those who are without sin, without doubt, controlled in mind and engaged in the welfare of all beings, such sages31 attain liberation in the brahman. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1600-1601 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 10:30:41 Greenwich Mean Time Poised in the senses, mind and intellect, beyond desire, fear and anger, wishing liberation, such a sage34 is always free. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4199-4200 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 10:58:16 Greenwich Mean Time His remoteness frustrated opponents, who felt they were boxing with a ghost. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4304-5 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 11:27:19 Greenwich Mean Time In dueling with Scott, Rockefeller didn’t try to demolish him—as Scott might have done to him—but called a truce to strengthen their alliance. His constant aim was to be conciliatory whenever possible and extend his range of influence. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4361-62 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 11:43:30 Greenwich Mean Time the thirty-eight-year-old Rockefeller, with piratical flair and tactical brilliance, had come to control nearly 90 percent of the oil refined in the United States. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4364-66 | Added on Friday, 30 April 21 11:43:48 Greenwich Mean Time He liked to point to these doughty survivors as proof that all the stories about the strong-arm tactics of Standard Oil were grossly exaggerated and that the oil industry was a scene of vibrant competition. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1729-30 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 07:08:34 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Forsaking in entirety all desire that results from wishes,29 using the mind itself to restrain the senses from everything ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1821-23 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 07:21:05 Greenwich Mean Time ‘The yogi is superior to those who practise austerities, superior to the learned51 and superior to those who perform action.52 That is my view. O Arjuna! Therefore, become a yogi. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 1834-35 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 07:22:05 Greenwich Mean Time jnana is knowledge acquired through instruction (from teachers or from sacred texts), while vijnana is knowledge acquired through self-realization. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4383-84 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 08:00:37 Greenwich Mean Time While Rockefeller communicated with his subordinates in genteel fashion, discussing muscular tactics with unctuous euphemisms, his colleagues were less restrained and gloried in their brutal shenanigans. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4438-39 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 08:16:57 Greenwich Mean Time Businessmen such as Rockefeller preferred to think of themselves as victims of political extortion, not as initiators of bribes. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4456-57 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 08:21:28 Greenwich Mean Time As always, Rockefeller floated serenely above the bustle, pretending to be oblivious to any wrongdoing, but his correspondence implicates him directly in this skulduggery. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4527-28 | Added on Saturday, 1 May 21 08:38:08 Greenwich Mean Time Always proud of his persuasive powers, Rockefeller took special pleasure in wooing opponents whom he had learned to appreciate by tracking their ploys against him. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4830-32 | Added on Sunday, 2 May 21 13:46:50 Greenwich Mean Time Many people noted that Rockefeller seldom said “I,” except when telling a joke, preferring the first-person plural when discussing Standard Oil. “Don’t say that I ought to do this or that,” he preached to colleagues. “We ought to do it. Never forget that we are partners; whatever is done is for the general good of us all.” 30 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4875-76 | Added on Sunday, 2 May 21 13:54:47 Greenwich Mean Time Rockefeller also possessed an unlikely charisma. He never backslapped, roughhoused, or skylarked with his colleagues, and his statesmanlike calm evoked feelings of awe. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4889-90 | Added on Sunday, 2 May 21 19:03:33 Greenwich Mean Time Once he had made up his mind, however, he was no longer troubled by doubts and pursued his vision with undeviating faith. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 4963-64 | Added on Sunday, 2 May 21 19:31:40 Greenwich Mean Time Was this the case of another smart Victorian woman who felt trapped by the few options open to her and took to bed and religion from boredom or self-defense? ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 4617-18 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 05:43:11 Greenwich Mean Time sannyasa does not mean asceticism and the abjuring of action. It means detachment and offering all action and its fruit to the paramatman. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 2260-61 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 05:43:51 Greenwich Mean Time ‘I am the same to all beings. I have no one I hate, nor anyone I love. But those who worship me with devotion, they are established in me. And I am established in them. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 2262-63 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 05:44:08 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Even if the most evil of persons worships me single-mindedly, he should be thought of as a righteous person. Because his resolve is correct. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5267-68 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 06:37:58 Greenwich Mean Time Starting in the 1880s, he adopted a policy of never doing business with strangers or even meeting them, avoiding unwanted solicitations and controversy. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5273 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 06:40:00 Greenwich Mean Time One way that he upheld this belief was to become self-righteous about his opponents, whom he reviled as undisguised rascals. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5403-5 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 09:23:25 Greenwich Mean Time Many frustrated customers of Waters-Pierce turned, in revenge, to Republic Oil, a New York–based company that specialized in cultivating retailers who loathed the trust. Of course, Republic was secretly owned by Standard Oil. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5412-14 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 09:27:41 Greenwich Mean Time Once Rockefeller controlled a marketing territory, he protected it fiercely and quickly dispatched troops to fend off the smallest incursion. If Standard Oil spotted even one carload of outside oil entering its territory, it traced its source through railroad agents and moved swiftly to halt it. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5464-65 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 09:41:33 Greenwich Mean Time Many of Rockefeller’s foes contended that routine underselling was his most lethal weapon, even more destructive than railroad rebates. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5506-7 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 10:51:46 Greenwich Mean Time In terms of real capital, the 200 percent dividend declared in January 1885 was more like 20 percent—extremely high but not astronomical. Such a rich but not altogether outrageous return was just what the politic Rockefeller wanted. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5594-95 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 11:30:52 Greenwich Mean Time “I had and have as much brains as John D. Rockefeller, but I have never had his cunning nor his ability to use unscrupulous means or unscrupulous men to carry out a programme,” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5593-96 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 11:36:55 Greenwich Mean Time Emery insisted, he would have ended up the more powerful oilman. “I had and have as much brains as John D. Rockefeller, but I have never had his cunning nor his ability to use unscrupulous means or unscrupulous men to carry out a programme,” he maintained.66 Though he spent much of his life stalking the titan, he never actually met Rockefeller, who was, he explained, “too much in the background, too cunning.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5622-26 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 14:22:53 Greenwich Mean Time The railroad agreed to charge Standard Oil 10 cents a barrel versus 35 cents for Rice and his fellow independents. Resurrecting the infamous drawback, Standard would also be paid 25 cents for every barrel that Rice shipped. In dictating this deal, O’Day bluntly warned the railroad that if it didn’t comply, he would build a competing pipeline and drive them out of business. In a rare successful suit against the trust, Rice forced Standard Oil to repudiate the nefarious contract and refund him $250. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5669-72 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 14:35:04 Greenwich Mean Time When the New York Sun dispatched a reporter to Cleveland in 1882 to investigate Rockefeller, he could not get near the mogul and was stunned by the layers of secrecy that surrounded him. He was further impressed by the silence of hundreds of Standard Oil employees he buttonholed, all schooled in Rockefeller’s philosophy. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5707-9 | Added on Tuesday, 4 May 21 14:41:02 Greenwich Mean Time To cool off a tense situation with a bland note was vintage Rockefeller, and there is no evidence that he ever again communicated with Warden on the subject. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 2472-73 | Added on Wednesday, 5 May 21 05:41:11 Greenwich Mean Time ‘I am danda among those who rule.69 I am strategy for those who wish to win. Among secret subjects, I am silence. I am knowledge among the wise. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5803-4 | Added on Wednesday, 5 May 21 06:35:24 Greenwich Mean Time In March 1889, the ailing Eliza was at William’s mansion at 689 Fifth Avenue when she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right side. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 5867-71 | Added on Wednesday, 5 May 21 06:52:39 Greenwich Mean Time The old man seemed to delight in embarrassing his son before their guests. At one point, Bill was sitting on the lawn, holding court, when John approached quietly. “Here comes Johnnie,” Bill taunted him. “I suppose he is a good Baptist, but look out how you trade with him.”23 Later, he told John that if he didn’t pay him fifty cents for every squirrel on the place, he would “shoot every damn one of them.”24 Everybody but John seemed to enjoy the humor. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 261-62 | Added on Wednesday, 5 May 21 12:57:31 Greenwich Mean Time Readers with religious attachments are invited to consider Zen not as a religion but as a therapeutic form of mental discipline — which, in its purest non-theistic forms, is exactly what Zen is. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6002 | Added on Thursday, 6 May 21 09:23:24 Greenwich Mean Time Pratt was a timid executive who lacked Rockefeller’s audacity and often felt slighted by him. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6226-27 | Added on Thursday, 6 May 21 10:43:34 Greenwich Mean Time Standard Oil’s strategy was to furnish as little information as possible. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6241-43 | Added on Thursday, 6 May 21 10:45:56 Greenwich Mean Time I never undertake to instruct the man who asks me questions. I remember that incident as if it were this morning. . . . I did not stop to correct my questioner. There is the record to stand on. Of course, I knew what I was answering. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6253-54 | Added on Thursday, 6 May 21 10:48:44 Greenwich Mean Time Choate said later that Rockefeller’s partners “seldom knew what he was thinking but he always knew what we were thinking.” ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6270-71 | Added on Thursday, 6 May 21 10:52:34 Greenwich Mean Time Free markets, if left completely to their own devices, can wind up terribly unfree. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 2822-23 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 05:28:16 Greenwich Mean Time Controlling properly the senses and looking upon everything equally, acting for the welfare of all beings, they only attain me. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 2852-53 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 05:35:06 Greenwich Mean Time ‘If, however, you are unable to perform these deeds also, control your mind, give up attachment to the fruits of all action and seek refuge in the yoga that is mine. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 2856-58 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 05:36:58 Greenwich Mean Time ‘He who has no hatred for all beings, is friendly and also displays compassion, is without sense of ego, without pride, regards happiness and unhappiness in the same way and is forgiving ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6356-58 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 06:06:15 Greenwich Mean Time A fine-looking man with a bushy mustache, Strong was grave, witty, and charming but tightly buttoned up and incapable of levity. An autocrat by nature, he didn’t become convinced by an idea so much as possessed by it to an extent that other people could find insufferable. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6367 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 06:07:35 Greenwich Mean Time Hypersensitive to pressure, Rockefeller tended to stiffen up whenever he felt pushed. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 493-94 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 09:06:32 Greenwich Mean Time The kind of people who become programmers and developers have ‘fun’ when the effort they have to put out to do a task challenges them, but is just within their capabilities. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 538 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 09:12:39 Greenwich Mean Time Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6489-90 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 10:08:07 Greenwich Mean Time With all the hostile publicity directed against Standard Oil during the debate over the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, it was certainly an auspicious time for Rockefeller to consider a major philanthropic bequest. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6745-46 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 12:04:28 Greenwich Mean Time Though he brushed off his critics as minor irritants and professed faith in his own integrity, it could not have been easy to face such universal opprobrium. Keeping up the pose of indifference must have taken its own toll. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 6882-83 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 12:32:44 Greenwich Mean Time As a philanthropist, Rockefeller chose to cultivate a wise detachment from his creations and told Harper that he saw himself as a silent partner in the operation. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 135-37 | Added on Friday, 7 May 21 19:48:29 Greenwich Mean Time To improve the world, however, all of us must first suspend faith in conventional wisdom. Let logic and evidence be the guide and our eyes will be opened to the reasons why politics works the way it does. Knowing how and why things are as they are is a first, crucial step toward learning how to make them better. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 4846 | Added on Saturday, 8 May 21 06:34:39 Greenwich Mean Time The Brahmanas, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads followed the Vedas and are collectively known as Vedanta. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7215-16 | Added on Saturday, 8 May 21 09:36:31 Greenwich Mean Time He was succeeded by John D. Archbold, his jovial, pugnacious protégé, who gave a more defiant and combative tone to the trust in its duels with government investigators, committing a public-relations blunder of no small magnitude. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 565 | Added on Saturday, 8 May 21 10:25:14 Greenwich Mean Time Design programs to be connected with other programs. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 609-11 | Added on Saturday, 8 May 21 10:32:28 Greenwich Mean Time Even more often (at least in the commercial software world) excessive complexity comes from project requirements that are based on the marketing fad of the month rather than the reality of what customers want or software can actually deliver. Many a good design has been smothered under marketing's pile of “checklist features” — features that, often, no customer will ever use. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 628-30 | Added on Saturday, 8 May 21 10:41:24 Greenwich Mean Time At minimum, it implies that debugging options should not be minimal afterthoughts. Rather, they should be designed in from the beginning — from the point of view that the program should be able to both demonstrate its own correctness and communicate to future developers the original developer's mental model of the problem it solves. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 4918-19 | Added on Sunday, 9 May 21 05:32:11 Greenwich Mean Time One is attached to what one already possesses. And one is thirsty for, or desirous of, what one does not already possess. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7401-2 | Added on Sunday, 9 May 21 07:56:00 Greenwich Mean Time Too entrenched to be ruffled by such journalistic pinpricks, Senator Aldrich stuck by his policy of “Deny nothing, explain nothing.”19 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7507-8 | Added on Sunday, 9 May 21 08:19:53 Greenwich Mean Time Cettie’s tone is especially revealing amid the rising attacks against Standard Oil. Much like her husband, she had fashioned an alternate reality in which, instead of being a corporate villain, he was converted into an American saint. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 656-58 | Added on Sunday, 9 May 21 08:59:45 Greenwich Mean Time Data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where you see a choice between complexity in data structures and complexity in code, choose the former. More: in evolving a design, you should actively seek ways to shift complexity from code to data. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 664-65 | Added on Sunday, 9 May 21 09:01:02 Greenwich Mean Time The easiest programs to use are those that demand the least new learning from the user ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 728-29 | Added on Sunday, 9 May 21 09:10:12 Greenwich Mean Time “Premature optimization is the root of all evil”.[11] ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7591-92 | Added on Monday, 10 May 21 12:19:32 Greenwich Mean Time “I think his greatest trouble was with ministers because he had a natural liking for them and they were always trying to get money out of him.”6 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7644-45 | Added on Monday, 10 May 21 12:46:51 Greenwich Mean Time Gates remarked to Rockefeller that benevolence was its own reward, that the man who looked for gratitude would die embittered. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7659-62 | Added on Monday, 10 May 21 12:50:56 Greenwich Mean Time “If you find [the prospective donor] big with gift do not rush him too eagerly to the birth. Let him take his time, with gentle management. Make him feel that he is giving it, not that it is being taken from him with violence.” Number seven advised: “Appeal only to the noblest motives. His own mind will suggest to him the lower and selfish ones.”22 ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 167-68 | Added on Monday, 10 May 21 14:27:41 Greenwich Mean Time This was the courtier’s dilemma: While appearing the very paragon of elegance, they had to outwit and thwart their own opponents in the subtlest of ways. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 196-98 | Added on Monday, 10 May 21 14:35:17 Greenwich Mean Time Treating everyone equally means ignoring their differences, elevating the less skillful and suppressing those who excel. Again, many of those who behave this way are actually deploying another power strategy, redistributing people’s rewards in a way that they determine. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 866-67 | Added on Monday, 10 May 21 16:57:16 Greenwich Mean Time the first running Unix code was brainstormed by three people and implemented by Ken Thompson in two days — on an obsolete machine that had been designed to be a graphics terminal for a ‘real’ computer. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 7887-89 | Added on Tuesday, 11 May 21 09:31:27 Greenwich Mean Time Stillman’s daughters, Elsie and Isabel, married William’s sons, William G. and Percy, breeding a line of Stillman Rockefellers who would be central figures in the subsequent history of National City Bank, today’s Citicorp. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8312-13 | Added on Tuesday, 11 May 21 13:36:13 Greenwich Mean Time Some years later, possibly with the Corrigan affair in mind, Rockefeller lectured his son, “John, never lend money to your friends; it will spoil your friendships.”119 ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 3526-29 | Added on Wednesday, 12 May 21 06:32:10 Greenwich Mean Time ‘Austerities performed with the objective of obtaining praise, respect or worship, and based on insolence, are said to be of the rajas type and in this, 31 are temporary and uncertain. (19) ‘Austerities performed on the basis of delusion, resulting in the oppression of one’s self or undertaken to destroy others, are said to be of the tamas type. ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 3787-88 | Added on Thursday, 13 May 21 06:50:49 Greenwich Mean Time ‘O son of Kunti! 51 Natural action should not be discarded, even if it is tainted. Because all action is tainted, ========== The Bhagavad Gita (Bibek Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 3872-74 | Added on Thursday, 13 May 21 06:58:54 Greenwich Mean Time ‘You should not state this 70 to those who do not meditate, 71 or are devoid of devotion or do not wish to hear. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 8954-55 | Added on Thursday, 13 May 21 10:00:29 Greenwich Mean Time “The virtue of forgetting, which is one of the most valuable virtues that a monopolist can have under cross-examination, is possessed by Mr. Rockefeller in its highest degree.”2 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9323 | Added on Friday, 14 May 21 08:22:28 Greenwich Mean Time By writing in such a relatively cool style, she made her readers boil with anger. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9605-6 | Added on Friday, 14 May 21 09:54:32 Greenwich Mean Time Tarbell got enough wrong that a modern public-relations expert could have dented her credibility and shaken Samuel McClure with the threat of a libel suit. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9635-37 | Added on Friday, 14 May 21 10:16:12 Greenwich Mean Time When William O. Inglis began to interview Rockefeller in 1917 and read aloud portions of Tarbell’s work, it grew clear that Rockefeller had only a vague familiarity with the series. It was equally clear that beneath his pose of stoic fortitude he was still angry. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9644-45 | Added on Friday, 14 May 21 10:17:13 Greenwich Mean Time Faced with Tarbell’s invective, Rockefeller was too proud to give the world the satisfaction of knowing that he was wounded. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 539-40 | Added on Friday, 14 May 21 17:43:24 Greenwich Mean Time definition of “atheist” is: a person who doesn’t pretend to know things he doesn’t know with regard to the creation of the universe. Some ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 9928-29 | Added on Saturday, 15 May 21 07:45:08 Greenwich Mean Time the allopaths, who used remedies that produced effects different from the disease in question, and homeopaths, who tried to induce in healthy persons prophylactic symptoms similar to the disease being fought. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1378-82 | Added on Sunday, 16 May 21 12:33:53 Greenwich Mean Time Unix has at least three levels of internal boundaries that guard against malicious users or buggy programs. One is memory management; Unix uses its hardware's memory management unit (MMU) to ensure that separate processes are prevented from intruding on the others' memory-address spaces. A second is the presence of true privilege groups for multiple users — an ordinary (nonroot) user's processes cannot alter or read another user's files without permission. A third is the confinement of security-critical functions to the smallest possible pieces of trusted code. Under Unix, even the shell (the system command interpreter) is not a privileged program. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 652-53 | Added on Sunday, 16 May 21 13:21:12 Greenwich Mean Time The Street Epistemologist seeks to help others reclaim their curiosity and their sense of wonder—both of which were robbed by faith. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 630-32 | Added on Sunday, 16 May 21 19:47:23 Greenwich Mean Time emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 648-49 | Added on Sunday, 16 May 21 19:51:43 Greenwich Mean Time abilities such as being able to handle frustrations, control emotions, and get on with other people made the greater difference.5 ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 728-31 | Added on Monday, 17 May 21 13:21:22 Greenwich Mean Time In some cases, individuals have damaged their thinking not only because they’ve habituated themselves to not proportioning their beliefs to the evidence, but also because they actually celebrate the fact that they don’t do so. For example, in matters relating to religion, God, and faith, believers are often told ignorance is a mark of closeness to God, spiritual enlightenment, and true faith. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 10931-33 | Added on Tuesday, 18 May 21 09:19:07 Greenwich Mean Time [The president] professed great ignorance of the affairs of the company, saying his knowledge of it was “nebulous.” As to the investigation on foot through Mr. Garfield’s department, he seemed to know little. . . . He exhibited no personal animosity or unkindly feeling, nor could they judge from anything said that he himself was at the bottom of this investigation. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 11734-38 | Added on Wednesday, 19 May 21 11:01:34 Greenwich Mean Time Rockefeller’s stepchildren would be everywhere: Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Standard Oil of New York (Mobil), Standard Oil of Indiana (Amoco), Standard Oil of California (Chevron), Atlantic Refining (ARCO and eventually Sun), Continental Oil (Conoco), today a unit of DuPont, and Chesebrough-Ponds, which had begun by processing petroleum jelly. Three offspring—Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron— would belong to the Seven Sisters group that would dominate the world oil industry in the twentieth century; a fourth sister, British Petroleum, later took over Standard Oil of Ohio, then known as Sohio. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1945-47 | Added on Wednesday, 19 May 21 11:36:12 Greenwich Mean Time Brooks's Law predicts that adding programmers to a late project makes it later. More generally, it predicts that costs and error rates rise as the square of the number of programmers on a project. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1976-77 | Added on Wednesday, 19 May 21 11:48:07 Greenwich Mean Time Does a programmer have to remember more than seven entry points? Anything larger than this is unlikely to be strictly compact. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 1991-93 | Added on Wednesday, 19 May 21 11:54:34 Greenwich Mean Time In a purely orthogonal design, operations do not have side effects; each action (whether it's an API call, a macro invocation, or a language operation) changes just one thing without affecting others. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 986-87 | Added on Wednesday, 19 May 21 15:02:14 Greenwich Mean Time Arie Kruglanski’s body of work on what he terms “the need for closure.” ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2178-80 | Added on Thursday, 20 May 21 06:28:27 Greenwich Mean Time The thin-glue principle can be viewed as a refinement of the Rule of Separation. Policy (the application logic) should be cleanly separated from mechanism (the domain primitives), but if there is a lot of code that is neither policy nor mechanism, chances are that it is accomplishing very little besides adding global complexity to the system. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 806-7 | Added on Thursday, 20 May 21 13:16:00 Greenwich Mean Time marshaling emotions in the service of a goal is essential for paying attention, for self-motivation and mastery, and for creativity. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 813-14 | Added on Thursday, 20 May 21 13:18:56 Greenwich Mean Time The art of relationships is, in large part, skill in managing emotions in others. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 855 | Added on Thursday, 20 May 21 13:33:47 Greenwich Mean Time "Know thyself speaks to this keystone of emotional intelligence: awareness of one's own feelings as they occur. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2275-76 | Added on Friday, 21 May 21 12:22:16 Greenwich Mean Time All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2288-90 | Added on Friday, 21 May 21 12:25:43 Greenwich Mean Time This tendency appears to be one of the reasons that, under Unix, OO languages have failed to displace non-OO workhorses like C, Perl (which actually has OO facilities, but they're not heavily used), and shell. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2333-34 | Added on Friday, 21 May 21 12:37:01 Greenwich Mean Time the design of file formats for retaining application data in permanent storage, and the design of application protocols for passing data and commands between cooperating programs, possibly over a network. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2365-66 | Added on Friday, 21 May 21 12:50:16 Greenwich Mean Time Text streams are a valuable universal format because they're easy for human beings to read, write, and edit without specialized tools. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2371-72 | Added on Friday, 21 May 21 12:51:17 Greenwich Mean Time If performance is what you're worried about, implementing compression on the text protocol stream either at some level below or above the application protocol will give you a cleaner and perhaps better-performing design than a binary protocol ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2391-92 | Added on Friday, 21 May 21 12:53:48 Greenwich Mean Time For graphics, bandwidth becomes everything on output; hardware is designed such that these days the graphics-card bus is the bottleneck for small operations, so any protocol had better be very tight if it is not to be a worse bottleneck. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12510-12 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 06:35:15 Greenwich Mean Time “We had three great organizations before the war, the famous trinity— the Germany army, the Standard Oil Company, and the Catholic Church. Each considers itself a perfectly moral institution . . . [yet] thousands of decent human beings have been destroyed by the Standard Oil Trust.”24 ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 12598-600 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 06:59:16 Greenwich Mean Time What Edith could not admit was that she argued from a weak position. She had cut herself off from her family, skipped her mother’s funeral, often showed little interest in her children, had crippling phobias, and had no immediate plans to return to the United States. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2487-88 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 09:51:21 Greenwich Mean Time DSV stands for Delimiter-Separated Values. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2601-3 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 10:13:50 Greenwich Mean Time The most serious problem with XML is that it doesn't play well with traditional Unix tools. Software that wants to read an XML format needs an XML parser; this means bulky, complicated programs. Also, XML is itself rather bulky; it can be difficult to see the data amidst all the markup. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1094-96 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 10:51:00 Greenwich Mean Time Few things are more dangerous than people who think they’re in possession of absolute truth. Honest inquirers with sincere questions and an open mind rarely contribute to the misery of the world. Passionate, doxastically closed believers contribute to human suffering and inhibit human well-being. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1099-1100 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 10:51:41 Greenwich Mean Time Often the faithful will attempt—intentionally or otherwise—to make you feel “less” because you don’t know what they’re pretending to know. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1117-20 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 10:57:12 Greenwich Mean Time Many rational, thoughtful people think that somehow, magically, the faithful don’t realize they are not basing their beliefs on reliable evidence—that if they were only shown solid evidence then voilà, they’d be cured! This is false. Remember: the core of the intervention is not changing beliefs, but changing the way people form beliefs—hence the term “epistemologist.” Bringing facts into the discussion is the wrong way to conceptualize the problem: the problem is with epistemologies people use, not with conclusions people hold. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 898-99 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 15:19:46 Greenwich Mean Time pattern found among, say, depressed people who are resigned to their despair. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 961-63 | Added on Saturday, 22 May 21 15:30:32 Greenwich Mean Time no one can as yet say for sure what causes alexithymia, Dr. Sifneos proposes a disconnection between the limbic system and the neocortex, particularly its verbal centers, which fits well with what we are learning about the emotional brain. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1146-47 | Added on Sunday, 23 May 21 09:39:38 Greenwich Mean Time Doxastic closure almost always results from pressures independent of evidence. Therefore you should avoid facts, evidence, metaphysics, and data points in discussions with those suffering from faith-based forms of doxastic closure. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1175-77 | Added on Sunday, 23 May 21 09:43:11 Greenwich Mean Time I’m advocating that we move the conversation forward by refocusing our attacks primarily on faith. By undermining faith one is able to undermine almost all religions simultaneously, and it may be easier to help someone to abandon their faith than it is to separate them from their religion. Your interventions should target faith, not religion. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1209-14 | Added on Sunday, 23 May 21 09:50:15 Greenwich Mean Time Attempting to disabuse people of a belief in God usually takes the counterproductive model of a debate. This is the wrong strategy and is highly unlikely to help people overcome their delusions (it may even force them into deeper doxastic closure and make them better debaters and thus more able to rationalize bad ideas). By targeting belief in God, you also run the risk of modeling the wrong behavior—the behavior of being doxastically closed—of having a closed belief system and an inability to revise your beliefs. This is not the behavior a Street Epistemologist should model in order to elicit behavioral change. You should be modeling doxastic openness—a willingness to revise your beliefs. ========== An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (Richard Dawkins) - Highlight Loc. 150-52 | Added on Sunday, 23 May 21 18:42:45 Greenwich Mean Time It often happens that family resemblances appear and disappear at different stages during a life history, which is one reason I find them fascinating. It is easy to forget that genes continue to exert their effects throughout life, not just during embryonic development. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 2910-11 | Added on Monday, 24 May 21 07:15:40 Greenwich Mean Time “Discoverability is about reducing barriers to entry; transparency is about reducing the cost of living in the code”. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3028-29 | Added on Monday, 24 May 21 07:33:26 Greenwich Mean Time The lesson here is clear. Dumbing down your UI is only the half-smart thing to do. The really smart thing is to find a way to leave the details accessible, but make them unobtrusive. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1275-77 | Added on Monday, 24 May 21 10:55:14 Greenwich Mean Time wrong?”14 I don’t make a statement about a subject’s beliefs being incorrect; instead, I ask the subject what conditions would have to be in place for her belief to be false. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1301-6 | Added on Monday, 24 May 21 11:02:36 Greenwich Mean Time there are some core lessons that can help the Street Epistemologist in dialectical interventions: Develop nonadversarial relationships Help clients think differently and understand what could be gained through change “Meet clients where they are”17 and don’t force a change Express empathy Go with resistance Tap into internal change behavior ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3173-76 | Added on Tuesday, 25 May 21 11:53:39 Greenwich Mean Time Object-oriented design doesn't have to be over-complicated design, but we've observed that too often it is. Too many OO designs are spaghetti-like tangles of is-a and has-a relationships, or feature thick layers of glue in which many of the objects seem to exist simply to hold places in a steep-sided pyramid of abstractions. Such designs are the opposite of transparent; they are (notoriously) opaque and difficult to debug. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1364 | Added on Tuesday, 25 May 21 13:13:23 Greenwich Mean Time Always be mindful that your relationship with the subject will make or break the treatment. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1364-67 | Added on Tuesday, 25 May 21 13:13:55 Greenwich Mean Time Always be mindful that your relationship with the subject will make or break the treatment. When appropriate, relate to your subject by bringing in shared personal experiences. For example, if you were the same religion as your subject, tell them that you too used to hold those beliefs. Be mindful of your goals throughout the intervention. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1513-15 | Added on Tuesday, 25 May 21 13:26:34 Greenwich Mean Time The creation of nonadversarial relationships is a necessary condition for a successful treatment. Trustfulness of reason and willingness to reconsider are two crucial posttreatment attitudes the faithful need in order to make a full recovery. ========== Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (Ron Chernow) - Highlight Loc. 13966-68 | Added on Tuesday, 25 May 21 19:24:50 Greenwich Mean Time Though free of self-pity, Rockefeller often seemed forlorn in the 1930s. Too proud to plead for visits from descendants, he dropped hints and tactful suggestions that he would like to see them more, but this did not seem to work. He craved some human warmth that he never fully got from his own family or perhaps had never really allowed to flower. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3308-9 | Added on Wednesday, 26 May 21 09:17:12 Greenwich Mean Time The most characteristic program-modularization technique of Unix is splitting large programs into multiple cooperating processes. This has usually been called ‘multiprocessing’ in the Unix world, ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3415-16 | Added on Wednesday, 26 May 21 09:50:07 Greenwich Mean Time It's important to note that all the stages in a pipeline run concurrently. Each stage waits for input on the output of the previous one, but no stage has to exit before the next can run. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3585-86 | Added on Thursday, 27 May 21 06:45:52 Greenwich Mean Time The pidfile may also function as an implicit lock file in cases where no more than one instance of the daemon should be running simultaneously. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3617-18 | Added on Thursday, 27 May 21 07:11:11 Greenwich Mean Time Sockets were developed in the BSD lineage of Unix as a way to encapsulate access to data networks. Two programs communicating over a socket typically see a bidirectional byte stream ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3622-26 | Added on Thursday, 27 May 21 07:12:38 Greenwich Mean Time Sockets differ from read/write in one important case. If the bytes you send arrive, but the receiving machine fails to ACK, the sending machine's TCP/IP stack will time out. So getting an error does not necessarily mean that the bytes didn't arrive; the receiver may be using them. This problem has profound consequences for the design of reliable protocols, because you have to be able to work properly when you don't know what was received in the past. Local I/O is ‘yes/no’. Socket I/O is ‘yes/no/maybe’. And nothing can ensure delivery — the remote machine might have been destroyed by a comet. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3633-34 | Added on Thursday, 27 May 21 07:19:51 Greenwich Mean Time All modern Unixes support BSD-style sockets, and as a matter of design they are usually the right thing to use for bidirectional IPC no matter where your cooperating processes are located. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1695-99 | Added on Thursday, 27 May 21 08:53:07 Greenwich Mean Time Socrates used his method as a guide to help people show themselves they didn’t know what they thought they knew.1 He exposed untrue beliefs, developed a sense of disquiet in his interlocutors, and elicited contradictions by asking pointed questions in an unthreatening way. These conversations forced people to substantively evaluate, and in many cases ultimately change, their beliefs. And this was all accomplished merely by asking a question, listening to the answer, then asking another question, listening to that answer, etc. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 1990-92 | Added on Thursday, 27 May 21 13:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time In my rush, I made a mistake by leading the subject too much. It would have been better to give him more cognitive space to come to his own conclusions and thus increase the likelihood of a successful transition to stage 5 (act accordingly). This is because he would have been more likely to accept the conclusion if he arrived at it of his own accord, as discussed earlier. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3707-10 | Added on Friday, 28 May 21 08:44:39 Greenwich Mean Time A ‘race condition’ is a class of problem in which correct behavior of the system relies on two independent events happening in the right order, but there is no mechanism for ensuring that they actually will. Race conditions produce intermittent, timing-dependent problems that can be devilishly difficult to debug. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 3847-49 | Added on Friday, 28 May 21 09:18:06 Greenwich Mean Time Tools to manage complexity are good things. But when the effect of those tools is to proliferate complexity rather than to control it, we would be better off throwing them away and starting from zero. An important part of the Unix wisdom is to never forget this. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1174-75 | Added on Friday, 28 May 21 12:43:09 Greenwich Mean Time But a cooling-down period will not work if that time is used to pursue the train of anger-inducing thought, since each such thought is in itself a minor trigger for more cascades of anger. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 2621-23 | Added on Saturday, 29 May 21 10:09:06 Greenwich Mean Time Defense: “You’re just talking about blind faith. My faith is not blind.” Response: “There is no need to modify the word ‘faith’ with the word ‘blind.’ All faith is blind. All faith is belief on the basis of insufficient evidence. That’s what makes it faith. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 2938-39 | Added on Wednesday, 2 June 21 12:49:06 Greenwich Mean Time people are not disturbed because they don’t understand why people rampage in the street, but because they do understand why people rampage in the street. ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 3399-3401 | Added on Tuesday, 8 June 21 19:25:08 Greenwich Mean Time “We fear clear, honest, blunt dialogue, but what we ought to fear are stupid and dangerous ideas, because while blunt and honest dialogue might be offensive to some, stupid and dangerous ideas can be fatal to all of us.” —Matt Thornton, community activist ========== A Manual for Creating Atheists (Peter Boghossian) - Highlight Loc. 3406-12 | Added on Tuesday, 8 June 21 19:27:23 Greenwich Mean Time One remedy for this is honesty and bluntness. Give the faithful the same dialectical and conversational reciprocity they give you. Be honest. Be direct. Be blunt. Be unapologetic. Don’t complain, apologize, or mumble in the defense of reason. Don’t tone it down or talk baby talk. Never say, “I’m sorry but …” or “Forgive me for saying …” or “You’ll excuse me for mentioning …” Instead, tell people exactly what you think and why you think it. Take a punch and give a punch. Speak truth in the face of danger. Be a part of Team Parrhesia. Be a Street Epistemologist. And don’t worry about people not respecting you. You’ll find people will respect you more, and not less, when you sincerely and directly confront their faith claims. Sincere, honest people are respected. People who are inauthentic and cower are not respected. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 5693-99 | Added on Wednesday, 9 June 21 16:41:06 Greenwich Mean Time Xerox PARC's early research into graphical user interfaces led them to propose the “model-view-controller” pattern as an archetype for GUIs. The “model” is what in the Unix world is usually called an “engine”. The model contains the domain-specific data structures and logic for your application. Database servers are archetypal examples of models. The “view” part is what renders your domain objects into a visible form. In a really well-separated model/view/controller application, the view component is notified of updates to the model and responds on its own, rather than being driven synchronously by the controller or by explicit requests for a refresh. The “controller” processes user requests and passes them as commands to the model. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1436-38 | Added on Thursday, 10 June 21 10:12:58 Greenwich Mean Time Davidson's theory is that, in terms of brain activity, it is energy-demanding work to experience distressing realities in a positive light. The increased physiological arousal may be due to the sustained attempt by the neural circuitry to maintain positive feelings or to suppress or inhibit any negative ones. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 250-51 | Added on Thursday, 10 June 21 12:39:17 Greenwich Mean Time I had learned from experience not to appear too eager. The worst thing I could do was try to promote myself. Boast and you’re toast. Just listen to these guys. Figure out what they want before you say anything. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 5933-34 | Added on Friday, 11 June 21 08:55:15 Greenwich Mean Time Given the cost ratio between hardware and programmer time, there are almost always better things to do with your time than to optimize a working system. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 5955-57 | Added on Friday, 11 June 21 08:57:16 Greenwich Mean Time When you have real-world evidence that your application is too slow, then (and only then) is the time to think about optimizing the code. But before you do more than think about optimizing, measure. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 6015-16 | Added on Friday, 11 June 21 09:14:52 Greenwich Mean Time But in the future, this might turn around again as caches grow larger. More generally, many optimizations are temporary and can easily turn into pessimizations as cost ratios change. The only way to know is to measure and see. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 6500 | Added on Sunday, 13 June 21 07:13:45 Greenwich Mean Time Stallman was unconcerned with minimalism; he sought the maximum power and scope for his code. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 999-1002 | Added on Sunday, 13 June 21 09:01:44 Greenwich Mean Time Sahaf, like other Iraqi ministers, lived in a world where every word he uttered was liable to make its way to Saddam Hussein’s ear—and, on occasion, to a translator at the U.S. National Security Agency. So he wasn’t only talking to us. He was talking to the walls as well. Saddam would get a full report on this meeting. It was like having him in the room. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 1024-25 | Added on Sunday, 13 June 21 09:05:21 Greenwich Mean Time On paper, it was an airtight system. On the ground, it was a logistical nightmare. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 1032-33 | Added on Sunday, 13 June 21 09:06:50 Greenwich Mean Time Since they did not have any direct contact with the United States, their only opportunity to blow off steam was with the UN. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 1125-37 | Added on Sunday, 13 June 21 09:26:08 Greenwich Mean Time An expression of disdain was pasted onto Ramadan’s face. A gun holster hung from his hip. Inside was a silver .45 Magnum with an ivory handle. The gun’s barrel pointed forward (toward us) when he sat down, which was not exactly a comfortable feeling. He remained silent for a few moments, which Pasha interpreted as an invitation to speak. It was not. Pasha had hardly uttered a sentence when the vice president cut him off. The contempt on Ramadan’s face was unmistakable. He began to speak through an interpreter, blasting the United States, Britain, and the UN for what seemed an eternity, occasionally raising his voice in a threatening manner, causing his interpreter, a scrawny little mouse of a man, to try to do the same. Evidently, they were a practiced duo. The VP would occasionally pause and fiddle with his gun holster, making it abundantly clear that Pasha wasn’t invited to talk. In fact, the vice president barely looked at Pasha the whole meeting, and so Pasha had the opportunity to throw some glances around the room. At one point, he did something incredible. Looking at Adnan, the protocol officer and the only Iraqi official we had sort of befriended, Pasha did an imitation of the vice president fiddling with his gun holster. This almost caused us to explode in laughter. I was able to contain myself only by looking down at my notes, but when I glanced at the Iraqi protocol officer, I saw that his face was painfully contorted. His jaw was trembling. Poor Adnan had tears in his eyes. I figured his only possible escape route, if Ramadan suddenly looked at him, was to pretend to be crying. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 1168-72 | Added on Sunday, 13 June 21 09:33:24 Greenwich Mean Time In the years to come, the Iraqi dictator would prove more successful than any world leader at playing the game of UN politics. Not only would he use our program to fill his own pockets with billions of dollars; he would also use it to buy support in the UN Security Council. In the end, this multiple violator of international law would succeed in turning the UN into a defensive shield against the world’s largest superpower. That one of the world’s most vicious human rights abusers finally succeeded in turning international law to his advantage remains an astounding achievement, in the grand scheme of history. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 6550-51 | Added on Monday, 14 June 21 07:53:33 Greenwich Mean Time As in Soto Zen, the journey is the destination; enlightenment has to be rediscovered in every day of practice. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 6576-78 | Added on Monday, 14 June 21 07:56:08 Greenwich Mean Time To apply the Unix philosophy effectively, you'll need to have more than just C in your toolkit. You'll need to learn how to use some of Unix's other languages (especially the scripting languages), and how to be comfortable mixing multiple languages in specialist roles within large program systems. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 6614-16 | Added on Monday, 14 June 21 08:00:52 Greenwich Mean Time The performance penalty of using a scripting language is very often insignificant for real-world programs, because real-world programs tend to be limited by waits for I/O events, network latency, and cache-line fills rather than by the efficiency with which they use the CPU itself. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 6711-12 | Added on Monday, 14 June 21 08:33:34 Greenwich Mean Time “C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog”. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 1550-51 | Added on Tuesday, 15 June 21 16:27:32 Greenwich Mean Time Pasha set the wrong tone for our relations with them right from the start with his “three northern governorates” nonsense. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 1567-69 | Added on Tuesday, 15 June 21 16:30:02 Greenwich Mean Time The Kurds had survived centuries of brutal repression. No diplomat was going to decide their future for them. Baghdad would never rule them again. If anything, they would help rule Baghdad. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 7157 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 04:18:24 Greenwich Mean Time Unix programmers traditionally learn how to use these tools by osmosis from other programmers, and by exploration over a period of years. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1457-58 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 05:52:32 Greenwich Mean Time one of the signs that feelings have veered over the line into the pathological is that they are so intrusive they overwhelm all other thought, continually sabotaging attempts to pay attention to whatever other task is at hand. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1548-50 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 11:43:10 Greenwich Mean Time Worry, of course, is in one sense a useful response gone awry—an overly zealous mental preparation for an anticipated threat. But such mental rehearsal is disastrous cognitive static when it becomes trapped in a stale routine that captures attention, intruding on all other attempts to focus elsewhere. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1552-53 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 11:44:24 Greenwich Mean Time The anxious are more likely to fail even given superior scores on intelligence tests, as a study of 1,790 students in training for air traffic control posts discovered. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1653-54 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 12:08:10 Greenwich Mean Time My hunch is that for a given level of intelligence, your actual achievement is a function not just of talent, but also of the capacity to stand defeat." ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 1676-77 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 12:13:13 Greenwich Mean Time People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong." ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 7258-60 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 18:29:37 Greenwich Mean Time lex generates parsers that are up to an order of magnitude slower than hand-coded parsers. This is not a good reason to hand-code, however; it's an argument for prototyping with lex and hand-hacking only if prototyping reveals an actual bottleneck. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 7373-75 | Added on Wednesday, 16 June 21 18:45:38 Greenwich Mean Time Non-file productions were intentional and in there from day one. ‘Make all’ and ‘clean’ were my own conventions from earliest days. One of the older Unix jokes is “Make love” which results in “Don't know how to make love”.   -- Stuart Feldman ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 7576-78 | Added on Monday, 21 June 21 20:33:35 Greenwich Mean Time Anyone who has been programming longer than a week knows that getting the syntax of your programming language right is the easy part of debugging. The hard part comes after that, when you need to understand why your syntactically correct program doesn't behave as you expect. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2216-17 | Added on Wednesday, 23 June 21 19:38:29 Greenwich Mean Time Many of them called it “comprehensive,” by which they meant it was too long and convoluted. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2224-25 | Added on Wednesday, 23 June 21 19:39:18 Greenwich Mean Time All perfectly good questions, for which we had only the vaguest answers, leaving them with nothing to sink their teeth into. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 7964-67 | Added on Thursday, 24 June 21 12:20:48 Greenwich Mean Time At one end, the “mere aggregation” certainly makes it safe to ship GPLed software on the same media with your proprietary code, provided they do not link to or call each other. They may even be tools operating on the same file formats or on-disk structures; that situation, under copyright law, would not make one a derivative of the other. At the other end, splicing GPLed code into your proprietary code, or linking GPLed object code to yours, certainly does make your code a derivative work and requires it to be GPLed. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2518-21 | Added on Friday, 25 June 21 14:56:05 Greenwich Mean Time I tried to explain to them that expecting accountability from the UN system was akin to expecting a blind dog to catch a flying Frisbee. By design, the UN Security Council is accountable only to itself. There is no proper separation among governing branches on the international stage. All power is concentrated among the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2536 | Added on Friday, 25 June 21 14:58:57 Greenwich Mean Time The Truth Is Not a Matter of Fact; It Is a Product of Consensus. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2539 | Added on Friday, 25 June 21 14:59:05 Greenwich Mean Time With greater responsibility came less freedom of speech. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2546-47 | Added on Friday, 25 June 21 15:00:21 Greenwich Mean Time when promoting a senseless or immoral policy, a diplomat is better off being caught in a lie than being caught admitting the truth. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2566-67 | Added on Saturday, 26 June 21 12:34:53 Greenwich Mean Time Glimmers of truth are much more likely to emerge during cappuccino breaks, lunches, or, better yet, during diplomatic cocktail parties. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2603-11 | Added on Saturday, 26 June 21 12:42:46 Greenwich Mean Time If a report comes in to a manager’s inbox warning of an imminent debacle requiring a risky decision? Easy: smack a yellow sticker on the memo and pass it along to a colleague with the note “Please advise on credibility of attached report.” The colleague will hate the manager, of course, because if disaster strikes while the report is in his inbox, he’ll be terribly embarrassed. So he’ll rush onto the web and print out an article corroborating the report and smack a new yellow sticker right on top of it with the words “See attached—would appear to confirm credibility of report.” What is a manager to do? He could smack a new yellow sticker on it and send it to the Office of Legal Affairs: “Please advise on options for legal action.” To doubly protect himself, he could use his URGENT stamp. But he knows that the use of his URGENT stamp may only get the report back into his own inbox faster. So eventually, he decides to call a meeting. The point of a meeting is to spread out responsibility for decisions—or, better, to find a reason why no decision can be made at all. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2645-46 | Added on Saturday, 26 June 21 12:52:58 Greenwich Mean Time it reflected the core nature of the UN’s management culture in that it ensured that the person with responsibility had no authority; and vice versa, it protected the people with authority from having to take responsibility. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2764-65 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 08:32:33 Greenwich Mean Time The formality of the communication system made it possible for two bureaucrats who did not feel like talking to each other to communicate exclusively through cc’s on memos to their boss. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2772 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 08:34:25 Greenwich Mean Time Always Be More Polite Than Your Enemy. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2772-74 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 08:34:55 Greenwich Mean Time Always Be More Polite Than Your Enemy. “Even in a declaration of war, one observes the rules of politeness.” OTTO VON BISMARCK ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2780-82 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 08:37:00 Greenwich Mean Time To stay sane, a bureaucrat has to win the occasional showdown. And the yardstick against which performances are judged is simple. In the absence of actual stakes, the bureaucrat who has the last polite word wins. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2155-58 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 18:58:55 Greenwich Mean Time The degree of emotional rapport people feel in an encounter is mirrored by how tightly orchestrated their physical movements are as they talk—an index of closeness that is typically out of awareness. One person nods just as the other makes a point, or both shift in their chairs at the same moment, or one leans forward as the other moves back. The orchestration can be as subtle as both people rocking in swivel chairs at the same rhythm. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2175-76 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 19:03:41 Greenwich Mean Time Setting the emotional tone of an interaction is, in a sense, a sign of dominance at a deep and intimate level: it means driving the emotional state of the other person. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2255-59 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 19:18:53 Greenwich Mean Time We all have known Cecils, people with an annoying lack of social graces—people who don't seem to know when to end a conversation or phone call and who keep on talking, oblivious to all cues and hints to say good-bye; people whose conversation centers on themselves all the time, without the least interest in anyone else, and who ignore tentative attempts to refocus on another topic; people who intrude or ask "nosy" questions. These derailments of a smooth social trajectory all bespeak a deficit in the rudimentary building blocks of interaction. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2300-2301 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 19:26:52 Greenwich Mean Time What matters most for whether a child is accepted or not is how well he or she is able to enter into the group's frame of reference, sensing what kind of play is in flow, what out of place. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2302-3 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 19:27:10 Greenwich Mean Time The two cardinal sins that almost always lead to rejection are trying to take the lead too soon and being out of synch with the frame of reference. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2307-10 | Added on Sunday, 27 June 21 19:29:00 Greenwich Mean Time Roger, the four-year-old whom Thomas Hatch spotted exhibiting a high level of interpersonal intelligence. 14 Roger's tactic for entering a group was first to observe, then to imitate what another child was doing, and finally to talk to the child and fully join the activity—a winning strategy. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 8805-8 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 05:45:19 Greenwich Mean Time When you write documentation for people within the Unix culture, don't dumb it down. If you write as if for idiots, you will be written off as an idiot yourself. Dumbing documentation down is very different from making it accessible; the former is lazy and omits important things, whereas the latter requires careful thought and ruthless editing. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 8884-86 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 06:05:40 Greenwich Mean Time Remember that the reason for frequent releases is to shorten and speed the feedback loop connecting your user population to your developers. Therefore, resist thinking of the next release as a polished jewel that cannot ship until everything is perfect. Don't make long wish lists. Make progress incrementally, admit and advertise current bugs, and have confidence that perfection will come with time. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2930-31 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 07:15:09 Greenwich Mean Time “You can’t do that. Listen, it’s good to have lofty goals. But if you just try to be nice to everybody, nobody’s going to respect you. You’ll never get anywhere like this.” ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 2936-37 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 07:15:50 Greenwich Mean Time “So go ahead,” said my father. “Make your enemies. Get into people’s faces. But for heaven’s sake, do it for the right reasons!” ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2478-82 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 12:26:59 Greenwich Mean Time Contempt's facial signature is a contraction of the "dimpler," the muscle that pulls the corners of the mouth to the side (usually the left) while the eyes roll upward. When one spouse flashes this expression, the other, in a tacit emotional exchange, registers a jump in heart rate of two or three beats per minute. This hidden conversation takes its toll; if a husband shows contempt regularly, Gottman found, his wife will be more prone to a range of health problems, from frequent colds and flus to bladder and yeast infections, as well as gastrointestinal symptoms. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2491-93 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 12:31:40 Greenwich Mean Time Stonewalling is the ultimate defense. The stone waller just goes blank, in effect withdrawing from the conversation by responding with a stony expression and silence. Stonewalling sends a powerful, unnerving message, something like a combination of icy distance, superiority, and distaste. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2495-96 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 12:32:10 Greenwich Mean Time contempt.14 As a habitual response stonewalling is devastating to the health of a relationship: it cuts off all possibility of working out disagreements. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2621 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 13:12:06 Greenwich Mean Time feeling heard is often exactly what the aggrieved partner really is after, emotionally an act of empathy is a masterly tension reducer. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2620-23 | Added on Monday, 28 June 21 13:12:43 Greenwich Mean Time Since feeling heard is often exactly what the aggrieved partner really is after, emotionally an act of empathy is a masterly tension reducer. Most notably missing in couples who eventually divorce are attempts by either partner in an argument to de-escalate the tension. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 9073-74 | Added on Tuesday, 29 June 21 05:24:07 Greenwich Mean Time Code required for portability should be isolated to a single area and a single set of source files (for example, an os subdirectory). ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 3024-25 | Added on Tuesday, 29 June 21 12:51:54 Greenwich Mean Time Kofi Annan had made the decision to meet with Saddam Hussein alone, without his aides. His rationale was to avoid a situation in which Saddam might be seen to lose face in front of his staff. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 9299-9300 | Added on Wednesday, 30 June 21 05:35:51 Greenwich Mean Time Evolutionary biologists have a rule: “Don't assume that historical origin specifies current utility, or vice versa”. ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 9373-74 | Added on Wednesday, 30 June 21 05:50:10 Greenwich Mean Time There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 3451-52 | Added on Wednesday, 30 June 21 08:25:56 Greenwich Mean Time “If you want to last in this business,” he told me, “you have to fly under the radar.” ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 9540-42 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 05:37:34 Greenwich Mean Time The choices come down to singing for your supper (getting paid through tips and donations), running a corner shop (a small, low-overhead service business), or finding a wealthy patron (some large firm that needs to use and modify open-source software for its business purposes). ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2876-77 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 09:06:32 Greenwich Mean Time "Later in life you may want to change your prejudice, but it is far easier to change your intellectual beliefs than your deep feelings. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2944-46 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 09:25:19 Greenwich Mean Time The single most important element in group intelligence, it turns out, is not the average IQ in the academic sense, but rather in terms of emotional intelligence. The key to a high group IQ is social harmony. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2954-56 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 09:27:34 Greenwich Mean Time One surprise was that people who were too eager to take part were a drag on the group, lowering its overall performance; these eager beavers were too controlling or domineering. Such people seemed to lack a basic element of social intelligence, the ability to recognize what is apt and what inappropriate in give-and-take. Another negative was having dead weight, members who did not participate. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2978-80 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 09:32:17 Greenwich Mean Time after detailed interviews, the critical differences emerged in the internal and interpersonal strategies "stars" used to get their work done. One of the most important turned out to be a rapport with a network of key people. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 2981-85 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 09:33:16 Greenwich Mean Time "A middle performer at Bell Labs talked about being stumped by a technical problem," Kelley and Caplan observed. "He painstakingly called various technical gurus and then waited, wasting valuable time while calls went unreturned and e-mail messages unanswered. Star performers, however, rarely face such situations because they do the work of building reliable networks before they actually need them. When they call someone for advice, stars almost always get a faster answer." ========== The Art of Unix Programming (Eric Steven Raymond) - Highlight Loc. 9984-88 | Added on Thursday, 1 July 21 12:50:55 Greenwich Mean Time “And how many hours would you require to implement and debug that C program?” asked Nubi. “Many”, admitted the visiting programmer. “But only a fool would spend the time to do that when so many more worthy tasks await him”. “And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?” ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 3824-27 | Added on Friday, 2 July 21 12:08:12 Greenwich Mean Time UN-ese usually includes a lot of sentences without an active subject: “all efforts must be made, all precautions should be taken, issues must be identified and remedies ought to be found, etc.…” By whom and how? one might ask. And the answer would usually be “by all concerned” and “in consultation with all relevant authorities.” ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3146-47 | Added on Saturday, 3 July 21 12:39:03 Greenwich Mean Time Being angry more than doubled the risk of cardiac arrest in people who already had heart disease; the heightened risk lasted for about two hours after the anger was aroused. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3209-12 | Added on Saturday, 3 July 21 17:24:50 Greenwich Mean Time In research at Stanford University School of Medicine with more than a thousand men and women who had suffered a first heart attack, those women who went on to suffer a second heart attack were marked by high levels of fearfulness and anxiety. In many cases the fearfulness took the form of crippling phobias: after their first heart attack the patients stopped driving, quit their jobs, or avoided going out. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3266-68 | Added on Saturday, 3 July 21 18:09:08 Greenwich Mean Time Both anger and anxiety, when chronic, can make people more susceptible to a range of disease. And while depression may not make people more vulnerable to becoming ill, it does seem to impede medical recovery and heighten the risk of death, especially with more frail patients with severe conditions. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 4413-14 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 05:28:22 Greenwich Mean Time We left her alone for a few days in Baghdad, during which she managed to freak out the Mukhabarat (Iraqi secret service) by asking them highly sensitive questions point-blank. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3460-63 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:14:45 Greenwich Mean Time Some mothers and fathers were like Ann and Carl: overbearing, losing patience with their child's ineptness, raising their voices in disgust or exasperation, some even putting their child down as "stupid"—in short, falling prey to the same tendencies toward contempt and disgust that eat away at a marriage. Others, however, were patient with their child's errors, helping the child figure the game out in his or her own way rather than imposing the parents' will. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3485-89 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:20:26 Greenwich Mean Time University of Washington team found that when parents are emotionally adept, compared to those who handle feelings poorly, their children—understandably—get along better with, show more affection toward, and have less tension around their parents. But beyond that, these children also are better at handling their own emotions, are more effective at soothing themselves when upset, and get upset less often. The children are also more relaxed biologically, with lower levels of stress hormones and other physiological indicators of emotional arousal ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3490-91 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:20:49 Greenwich Mean Time Other advantages are social: these children are more popular with and are better-liked by their peers, and are seen by their teachers as more socially skilled. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3503-7 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:29:37 Greenwich Mean Time babies who come from homes too bleak, chaotic, or neglectful go about the same small task in a way that signals they already expect to fail. It is not that these babies fail to bring the blocks together; they understand the instruction and have the coordination to comply. But even when they do, reports Brazelton, their demeanor is "hangdog," a look that says, "I'm no good. See, I've failed." Such children are likely to go through life with a defeatist outlook, expecting no encouragement or interest from teachers, finding school joyless, perhaps eventually dropping out. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3522-32 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:34:16 Greenwich Mean Time The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity—all related to emotional intelligence:6 1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one's body, behavior, and world; the child's sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful. 2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure. 3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective. 4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one's own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control. 5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others. 6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults. 7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one's own needs with those of others in group activity. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3545-47 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:38:09 Greenwich Mean Time first baby is learning that people can be trusted to notice her needs and counted on to help, and that she can be effective in getting help; the second is finding that no one really cares, that people can't be counted on, and that his efforts to get solace will meet with failure. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3552-55 | Added on Monday, 5 July 21 19:40:44 Greenwich Mean Time A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating and asks her busy mother to help gets one message if the reply is the mother's clear pleasure at the request, and quite another if it's a curt "Don't bother me—I've got important work to do." When such encounters become typical of child and parent, they mold the child's emotional expectations about relationships, outlooks that will flavor her functioning in all realms of life, for better or worse. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3557-58 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 06:12:28 Greenwich Mean Time Simple neglect, studies find, can be more damaging than outright abuse. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3557-59 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 06:13:38 Greenwich Mean Time Simple neglect, studies find, can be more damaging than outright abuse.8 A survey of maltreated children found the neglected youngsters doing the worst of all: they were the most anxious, inattentive, and apathetic, alternately aggressive and withdrawn. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3599-3600 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 06:25:27 Greenwich Mean Time crying is met at first with a peremptory consoling gesture, but if it continues, the progression is from nasty looks and shouts, to hitting, to outright beating. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 4675-77 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 07:45:02 Greenwich Mean Time According to the UN Charter, force can be used only in situations of legitimate defense or as authorized by the UN Security Council under Article 42, to confront threats to international peace and security. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 4713-15 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 07:52:49 Greenwich Mean Time As the Iraqi guard struggled to pull him out, the man shouted, “I am unjustly treated! I am unjustly treated!” Clearly, the Iraqi man was assuming that the UN cared. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3669-72 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 11:14:30 Greenwich Mean Time Violent acts are more pernicious than natural catastrophes such as a hurricane because, unlike victims of a natural disaster, victims of violence feel themselves to have been intentionally selected as the target of malevolence. That fact shatters assumptions about the trustworthiness of people and the safety of the interpersonal world, an assumption natural catastrophes leave untouched. Within an instant, the social world becomes a dangerous place, one in which people are potential threats to your safety. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3694-95 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 11:21:31 Greenwich Mean Time PTSD represents a perilous lowering of the neural setpoint for alarm, leaving the person to react to life's ordinary moments as though they were emergencies. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3733-35 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 11:31:54 Greenwich Mean Time memories.8 Vietnam vets with PTSD, one study found, had 40 percent fewer catecholamine-stopping receptors than did men without the symptoms—suggesting that their brains had undergone a lasting change, ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3752-53 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 11:42:26 Greenwich Mean Time anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure) and a general emotional numbness, a sense of being cut off from life or from concern about others' feelings. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3766-67 | Added on Tuesday, 6 July 21 11:46:40 Greenwich Mean Time Such traumatic memories seem to remain as fixtures in brain function because they interfere with subsequent learning—specifically, with relearning a more normal response to those traumatizing events. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3893-97 | Added on Wednesday, 7 July 21 07:55:59 Greenwich Mean Time what seems to remain, even after successful psychotherapy, is a vestigial reaction, a remnant of the original sensitivity or fear at the root of a troubling emotional pattern.21 The prefrontal cortex can refine or put the brakes on the amygdala's impulse to rampage, but cannot keep it from reacting in the first place. Thus while we cannot decide when we have our emotional outbursts, we have more control over how long they last. A quicker recovery time from such outbursts may well be one mark of emotional maturity. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5104-7 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 07:16:22 Greenwich Mean Time Spooky had predicted a bloodbath in which only the most agile political backstabbers would survive. Another veteran of political investigations in Washington had made it even plainer to me: “Sharpen your knife, young man. There’s only two ways these things can go. Either the blame is put on people at the bottom of the pyramid or it’s laid on people at the top. Where do you think it belongs?” ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5380-81 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 08:20:10 Greenwich Mean Time “I’m not out to damage anybody. I advised an investigation for months! Nobody listened, so now I made the advice public. I figured it was the only way to get anyone’s attention over there.” ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5395-96 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 08:20:41 Greenwich Mean Time “A memo?” I thought I heard him wrong. I was no longer working for the UN. And Rehan Mullick, the last person who had written a memo that rocked the boat, had been ignored, then fired. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5407-9 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 08:22:04 Greenwich Mean Time “Just remember,” said my former colleague, “not everyone has the option of doing what you are doing. Most people can’t afford to leave this place. They have nowhere else to go.” ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5413-14 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 08:23:18 Greenwich Mean Time each of us hotheads could find justification in the words of Mark Twain: “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.” ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3955-57 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 09:56:49 Greenwich Mean Time middle-aged women who remember having been especially shy in childhood, when compared with their more outgoing peers, tend to go through life with more fears, worries, and guilt, and to suffer more from stress-related problems such as migraine headaches, irritable bowel, and other stomach problems. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3972-73 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 10:03:29 Greenwich Mean Time Timid children, Kagan postulates, may have inherited chronically high levels of norepinephrine or other brain chemicals that activate the amygdala and so create a low threshold of excitability, making the amygdala more easily triggered. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 3979-81 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 10:05:49 Greenwich Mean Time Silence is another barometer of timidity. Whenever Kagan's team observed shy and bold children in a natural setting—in their kindergarten classes, with other children they did not know, or talking with an interviewer—the timid children talked less. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4006-7 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 10:16:56 Greenwich Mean Time This dimension of temperament—ebullience at one end, melancholy at the other—seems linked to the relative activity of the right and left prefrontal areas, the upper poles of the emotional brain. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4008-11 | Added on Friday, 9 July 21 10:17:36 Greenwich Mean Time people who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with relatively greater activity on the right side are given to negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life's difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they cannot turn off their worries and depressions. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5778-81 | Added on Saturday, 10 July 21 13:03:07 Greenwich Mean Time This was during my own paranoid phase, when I was blaming Cindy for manipulating Pasha into isolating our office. I had it all wrong. Pasha was always firmly in control. Cindy was only his tool, and he knew exactly how to use her. The reason he didn’t want our office communicating with the Security Council was that we were constantly raising issues of noncompliance by the Iraqi regime. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5816-19 | Added on Saturday, 10 July 21 13:07:20 Greenwich Mean Time They would blame other colleagues but never Pasha. He played stupid all along, even as he was sowing division around his shop. In retrospect, I’d say nobody played stupid better than Pasha. He had elevated it to an art form. His outbursts of anger, irrational as they seemed, were never improvised. Even his incomprehensible elocution often worked in his favor. He ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 5981-83 | Added on Saturday, 10 July 21 13:30:03 Greenwich Mean Time Pasha being Pasha, he eventually invited Rosett in for coffee. As a rule, he liked to “keep his enemies close,” even if this meant having coffee with someone who had hounded him for the past couple of years and played a significant role in causing his downfall. ========== Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Michael Soussan) - Highlight Loc. 6053-57 | Added on Saturday, 10 July 21 13:39:36 Greenwich Mean Time The system tends to transform young idealists into old realists. Both outlooks have their inherent flaws (idealists can be alarmingly naïve, just as realists can be dangerously cynical), but both offer necessary, even complementary, contributions to the process. In fact, the idealism/realism dichotomy is at the center of most debates in the field of international affairs. In the real world of diplomacy, the clash between these two worldviews often translates into a clash between generations. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4031-33 | Added on Saturday, 10 July 21 19:33:27 Greenwich Mean Time The correlation was virtually 100 percent: of dozens of infants tested this way, every infant who cried had more brain activity on the right side, while those who did not had more activity on the left. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4038-40 | Added on Saturday, 10 July 21 19:50:23 Greenwich Mean Time The encouraging news from Kagan's studies is that not all fearful infants grow up hanging back from life—temperament is not destiny. The overexcitable amygdala can be tamed, with the right experiences. What makes the difference are the emotional lessons and responses children learn as they grow. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4135-36 | Added on Sunday, 11 July 21 09:57:02 Greenwich Mean Time neglect or abuse, the misattunement of a self-absorbed or indifferent parent, or brutal discipline can leave their imprint on the emotional circuitry. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4246-52 | Added on Sunday, 11 July 21 19:20:10 Greenwich Mean Time Not all angry children are bullies; some are withdrawn social outcasts who overreact to being teased or to what they perceive as slights or unfairness. But the one perceptual flaw that unites such children is that they perceive slights where none were intended, imagining their peers to be more hostile toward them than they actually are. This leads them to misperceive neutral acts as threatening ones—an innocent bump is seen as a vendetta—and to attack in return. That, of course, leads other children to shun them, isolating them further. Such angry, isolated children are highly sensitive to injustices and being treated unfairly. They typically see themselves as victims and can recite a list of instances when, say, teachers blamed them for doing something when in fact they were innocent. Another trait of such children is that once they are in the heat of anger they can think of only one way to react: by lashing out. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4379-82 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 09:53:08 Greenwich Mean Time "For the last thirty or forty years we've seen the ascendance of individualism and a waning of larger beliefs in religion, and in supports from the community and extended family. That means a loss of resources that can buffer you against setbacks and failures. To the extent you see a failure as something that is lasting and which you magnify to taint everything in your life, you are prone to let a momentary defeat become a lasting source of hopelessness. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4389-91 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 09:54:50 Greenwich Mean Time depression should not just be treated, but prevented, in children is clear from an alarming discovery: Even mild episodes of depression in a child can augur more severe episodes later in life. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4406-7 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 09:59:52 Greenwich Mean Time depressed kids are likely to be among the neglected children in a school, the ones other kids don't play with much." ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4411-13 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 10:01:48 Greenwich Mean Time when depressed children have been compared to those without depression, they have been found to be more socially inept, to have fewer friends, to be less preferred than others as playmates, to be less liked, and to have more troubled relationships with other children. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4415-16 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 10:02:15 Greenwich Mean Time A child who feels no joy in anything will find it hard to marshal the energy to master challenging lessons, let alone experience flow in learning. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4427-28 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 10:05:17 Greenwich Mean Time Children who say none of these positive descriptions fits them have little sense that they can do anything to change things; this sense of helplessness is highest in those children who are most depressed. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4447-50 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 11:56:50 Greenwich Mean Time experience of depression itself seems to reinforce these pessimistic ways of thinking, so that even after the depression lifts, the child is left with what amounts to an emotional scar, a set of convictions fed by the depression and solidified in the mind: that he can't do well in school, is unlikable, and can do nothing to escape his own brooding moods. These fixed ideas can make the child all the more vulnerable to another depression down the road. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4514-16 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 12:55:36 Greenwich Mean Time these girls have trouble distinguishing among their most basic feelings. They may have a problem with their boyfriend, and not be sure whether they're angry, or anxious, or depressed—they just experience a diffuse emotional storm that they do not know how to deal with effectively. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4536-39 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 13:08:10 Greenwich Mean Time what is most telling about Ben's reaction is his failure to respond to Jason's efforts to repair their friendship, a stance that extends his plight when it might have ended. Such an inability to seize key cues is typical of children who are unpopular; as we saw in Chapter 8, socially rejected children typically are poor at reading emotional and social signals; even when they do read such signals, they may have limited repertoires for response. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4543-46 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 13:19:26 Greenwich Mean Time Two kinds of emotional proclivities lead children to end up as social outcasts. As we have seen, one is the propensity to angry outbursts and to perceive hostility even where none is intended. The second is being timid, anxious, and socially shy. But over and above these temperamental factors, it is children who are "off—whose awkwardness repeatedly makes people uncomfortable—who tend to be shunted aside. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4555-56 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 13:22:43 Greenwich Mean Time In the lottery of liking, these children fall short on key emotional criteria: they are not seen as fun to be with, and they don't know how to make another child feel good. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4557-58 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 13:23:15 Greenwich Mean Time most children want to win at a game—but win or lose, most children are able to contain their emotional reaction so that it does not undermine the relationship with the friend they play games with. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4733-36 | Added on Monday, 12 July 21 17:21:28 Greenwich Mean Time The emotional skills include self-awareness; identifying, expressing, and managing feelings; impulse control and delaying gratification; and handling stress and anxiety. A key ability in impulse control is knowing the difference between feelings and actions, and learning to make better emotional decisions by first controlling the impulse to act, then identifying alternative actions and their consequences before acting. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4788-89 | Added on Tuesday, 13 July 21 09:01:24 Greenwich Mean Time That is how emotional learning becomes ingrained; as experiences are repeated over and over, the brain reflects them as strengthened pathways, neural habits to apply in times of duress, frustration, hurt. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 4843-44 | Added on Tuesday, 13 July 21 09:28:00 Greenwich Mean Time the point is not to avoid conflict completely, but to resolve disagreement and resentment before it spirals into an out-and-outfight. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 5212-15 | Added on Wednesday, 14 July 21 07:31:43 Greenwich Mean Time A related keystone of character is being able to motivate and guide oneself, whether in doing homework, finishing a job, or getting up in the morning. And, as we have seen, the ability to defer gratification and to control and channel one's urges to act is a basic emotional skill, one that in a former day was called will. "We need to be in control of ourselves—our appetites, our passions—to do right by others," ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 5277-81 | Added on Wednesday, 14 July 21 12:49:21 Greenwich Mean Time In the outer ripples are moods, which, technically speaking, are more muted and last far longer than an emotion (while it's relatively rare to be in the full heat of anger all day, for example, it is not that rare to be in a grumpy, irritable mood, in which shorter bouts of anger are easily triggered). Beyond moods are temperaments, the readiness to evoke a given emotion or mood that makes people melancholy, timid, or cheery. And still beyond such emotional dispositions are the outright disorders of emotion such as clinical depression or unremitting anxiety, in which someone feels perpetually trapped in a toxic state. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 5422-23 | Added on Wednesday, 14 July 21 13:37:04 Greenwich Mean Time The net effect of norepinephrine is to heighten the overall reactivity of the brain areas that receive it, making the sensory circuits more sensitive. ========== Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman) - Highlight Loc. 5422-28 | Added on Wednesday, 14 July 21 13:38:07 Greenwich Mean Time The net effect of norepinephrine is to heighten the overall reactivity of the brain areas that receive it, making the sensory circuits more sensitive. Norepinephrine suffuses the cortex, the brainstem, and the limbic system itself, in essence setting the brain on edge. Now even the ordinary creaking of the house can send a tremor of fear coursing through you. Most of these changes go on outside awareness, so that you are not yet aware you feel fear. But as you begin to actually feel fear—that is, as the anxiety that had been unconscious pierces awareness—the amygdala seamlessly commands a wide-ranging response. It signals cells in the brainstem to put a fearful expression on your face, make you edgy and easily startled, freeze unrelated movements your muscles had underway, speed your heart rate and raise your blood pressure, and slow your breathing ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 141-42 | Added on Tuesday, 20 July 21 06:44:15 Greenwich Mean Time bad behavior is more often than not good politics. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 225-27 | Added on Tuesday, 20 July 21 12:03:48 Greenwich Mean Time The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 231-32 | Added on Tuesday, 20 July 21 12:04:31 Greenwich Mean Time Love and affection are also potentially destructive, in that they blind you to the often self-serving interests of those whom you least suspect of playing a power game. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 280-81 | Added on Tuesday, 20 July 21 12:11:59 Greenwich Mean Time “The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 288-89 | Added on Tuesday, 20 July 21 12:13:08 Greenwich Mean Time An understanding of people’s hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power. It opens up endless possibilities of deception, seduction, and manipulation. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 244-46 | Added on Wednesday, 28 July 21 17:39:38 Greenwich Mean Time When a leader’s hold on power—his or her political survival—depends on a small coalition of backers (remember the small percentage of voters needed to actually win a seat on the city council), then providing private rewards is the path to long tenure in office: Mr. Rizzo kept his job for seventeen years. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 267-68 | Added on Wednesday, 28 July 21 17:45:22 Greenwich Mean Time where politics are concerned, ideology, nationality, and culture don’t matter all that much. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 300-302 | Added on Wednesday, 28 July 21 17:50:46 Greenwich Mean Time Montesquieu, who maintained that, “In a large republic the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views; it is subordinate to exceptions; and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is easier perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have a lesser extent, and of course are less protected.” ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 389-90 | Added on Friday, 30 July 21 19:18:43 Greenwich Mean Time no emperor, no king, no sheikh, no tyrant, no chief executive officer (CEO), no family head, no leader whatsoever can govern alone. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 509-12 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 05:09:04 Greenwich Mean Time The beauty of talking about organizations in terms of essentials, influentials, and interchangeables is that these categories permit us to refrain from arbitrarily drawing a line between forms of governance, pronouncing one “democratic” and another “autocratic,” or one a large republic and another small, or any of the other mostly one-dimensional views of politics expressed by some of history’s leading political philosophers. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 514-15 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 05:09:46 Greenwich Mean Time The more significant and observable differences in the behavior of governments and organizations are dependent on the absolute and relative size of the interchangeable, influential, and essential groups. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 546-47 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 05:15:53 Greenwich Mean Time Managing the interchangeables, influentials, and essentials to that end is the act, art, and science of governing. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 584-87 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 05:25:36 Greenwich Mean Time But when the coalition of essential backers is small and private goods are an efficient way to stay in power, then the well-being of the broader population falls by the wayside, contrary to the view expressed by Hobbes. In this setting leaders want to tax heavily, redistributing wealth by taking as much as they can from the poor interchangeables and the disenfranchised, giving that wealth in turn to the members of the winning coalition, making them fat, rich, and loyal. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 656-59 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 13:27:56 Greenwich Mean Time And our notion of governing for political survival tells us that there are five basic rules leaders can use to succeed in any system:   Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 660-61 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 13:28:19 Greenwich Mean Time Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 665-67 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 13:29:56 Greenwich Mean Time Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 668-69 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 13:30:38 Greenwich Mean Time Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 672-74 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 13:30:59 Greenwich Mean Time Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better. The flip side of rule 4 is not to be too cheap toward your coalition of supporters. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 385-88 | Added on Monday, 2 August 21 14:23:27 Greenwich Mean Time Everyone has insecurities. When you show yourself in the world and display your talents, you naturally stir up all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity. This is to be expected. You cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others. With those above you, however, you must take a different approach: When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 712-13 | Added on Tuesday, 3 August 21 05:46:39 Greenwich Mean Time Nothing annoyed Roosevelt as much as high-sounding principles backed by neither the power nor the will to implement them. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 763-64 | Added on Tuesday, 3 August 21 07:35:12 Greenwich Mean Time Waiting is risky business. There is no prize for coming in second. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 461-64 | Added on Tuesday, 3 August 21 09:56:24 Greenwich Mean Time Thus for my own part l have more than once been deceived by the person I loved most and of whose love, above everyone else’s, I have been most confident. So that I believe that u may be right to love and serve one person above all others. according to merit and worth, but never to trust so much in this tempting trap of friendship as to have cause to repent of it later on. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 965-68 | Added on Sunday, 8 August 21 14:49:46 Greenwich Mean Time But remember, what constitutes doing the right thing must be understood from the perspective of a potential supporter; it may have nothing to do with what is best for a community or nation. Anyone who thinks leaders do what they ought to do—that is, do what is best for their nation of subjects—ought to become an academic rather than enter political life. In politics, coming to power is never about doing the right thing. It is always about doing what is expedient. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1008-10 | Added on Saturday, 14 August 21 09:16:54 Greenwich Mean Time defected.8 Silence, as Ben Bella learned far too late, truly is golden. There is never a point in showing your hand before you have to; that is just a way to ensure giving the game away. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1073-74 | Added on Saturday, 14 August 21 09:32:37 Greenwich Mean Time you can come to power in a democracy if you have good, or at least popular, ideas. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1120-22 | Added on Saturday, 14 August 21 09:41:43 Greenwich Mean Time In democracies, politics is an arms race of ideas. Just as the democrat has to be responsive to the people when governing, when seeking office it helps to propose policies that the voters like and it pays to want to do more ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1150-51 | Added on Saturday, 14 August 21 09:50:23 Greenwich Mean Time successful leaders manage these risks by locking in a loyal coalition. Those who fail at this first task open the door for someone else to overthrow them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 589-90 | Added on Sunday, 15 August 21 09:31:30 Greenwich Mean Time Kissinger made a policy of working with those who disagreed with him. Colleagues commented that he seemed to get along better with his enemies than with his friends. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 612-13 | Added on Tuesday, 17 August 21 07:50:47 Greenwich Mean Time The wise man profits more from his enemies, than a fool from his friends. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 626-28 | Added on Tuesday, 17 August 21 07:52:35 Greenwich Mean Time Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 651-52 | Added on Tuesday, 17 August 21 07:56:54 Greenwich Mean Time All of this would push her into the state of emotional confusion that is a prerequisite for successful seduction. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 677-79 | Added on Tuesday, 17 August 21 08:16:27 Greenwich Mean Time Do not be held a cheat, even though it is impossible to live today without being one. Let your greatest cunning lie in covering up what looks like cunning. Ballasar Gracián, 1601-1658 ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1200-1201 | Added on Wednesday, 18 August 21 07:56:02 Greenwich Mean Time Research into CEO longevity teaches us, not surprisingly, that time in office lengthens as one maintains close personal ties to members of the board. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1245-48 | Added on Wednesday, 18 August 21 08:04:46 Greenwich Mean Time But markets don’t like infighting, and when Walter Hewlett and David Woodley Packard declared their opposition to the merger, the gains were reversed. Soon the price collapsed even further, halving as it became apparent that there was to be a proxy fight in which Hewlett and Packard sought to muster support from enough shareholders to defeat the board’s proposed slate at the corporation’s annual meeting. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1299-1300 | Added on Wednesday, 18 August 21 08:13:29 Greenwich Mean Time This is the essential lesson of politics: in the end ruling is the objective, not ruling well. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 711-16 | Added on Wednesday, 18 August 21 09:02:35 Greenwich Mean Time Most people are open books. They say what they feel, blurt out their opinions at every opportunity, and constantly reveal their plans and intentions. They do this for several reasons. First, it is easy and natural to always want to talk about one’s feelings and plans for the future. It takes effort to control your tongue and monitor what you reveal. Second, many believe that by being honest and open they are winning people’s hearts and showing their good nature.They are greatly deluded. Honesty is actually a blunt instrument, which bloodies more than it cuts. Your honesty is likely to offend people; it is much more prudent to tailor your words, telling people what they want to hear rather than the coarse and ugly truth of what you feel or think. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 734-35 | Added on Wednesday, 18 August 21 09:10:45 Greenwich Mean Time Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals—just not your real ones. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 904-7 | Added on Thursday, 19 August 21 04:52:09 Greenwich Mean Time In Roosevelt’s estimation, only mystics, dreamers, and intellectuals held the view that peace was man’s natural condition and that it could be maintained by disinterested consensus. To him, peace was inherently fragile and could be preserved only by eternal vigilance, by the arms of the strong, and by alliances among the like-minded. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 922 | Added on Thursday, 19 August 21 04:55:43 Greenwich Mean Time almost all significant changes in history have involved violence and upheaval. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1305-6 | Added on Thursday, 19 August 21 19:00:44 Greenwich Mean Time In fact, having competent ministers, or competent corporate board members, can be a dangerous mistake. Competent people, after all, are potential (and potentially competent) rivals. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1347-48 | Added on Thursday, 19 August 21 19:19:50 Greenwich Mean Time the principle of choosing close advisers who cannot rise to the top spot remains good advice. It is surely no coincidence that Saddam Hussein as president of Islamic Iraq had a Christian, Tariq Aziz, as his number two. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1375-76 | Added on Thursday, 19 August 21 19:26:49 Greenwich Mean Time The essence of keeping coalition members off-balance is to make sure that their loyalty is paid for and that they know they will be ousted if their reliability is in doubt. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 918-19 | Added on Friday, 20 August 21 13:30:34 Greenwich Mean Time Conceal your purpose and hide your progress; do not disclose the extent of your designs until they cannot be opposed, until the combat is over. Win the victory before you declare the war. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1424-25 | Added on Sunday, 22 August 21 07:15:09 Greenwich Mean Time Leaders should therefore never refrain from cheating if they can get away with it. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1533-35 | Added on Wednesday, 25 August 21 04:59:26 Greenwich Mean Time off.18 In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe went one step further. In an operation called Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out the Rubbish), he used bulldozers to demolish the houses and markets in neighborhoods that failed to support him in the 2005 election. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1571-73 | Added on Wednesday, 25 August 21 05:11:35 Greenwich Mean Time A smart leader sacks some early backers, replacing them with more reliable and cheaper supporters. But no matter how much he packs the coalition with his friends and supporters, they will not remain loyal unless he rewards them. And as we will see in the next chapter, rewards don’t come cheaply. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1575-76 | Added on Friday, 27 August 21 18:56:37 Greenwich Mean Time WHETHER YOU’RE TAKING CHARGE OF THE OTTOMAN Empire, a corporation, or Liberia, controlling the flow of funds is essential to buying support. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1589-91 | Added on Friday, 27 August 21 19:01:30 Greenwich Mean Time “Knowing where the money is” is particularly important in autocracies—and particularly difficult. Such systems are shrouded in secrecy. Supporters must be paid but there are no accurate accounts detailing stocks and flows of wealth. Of course, this lack of transparency is by design. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1718-19 | Added on Saturday, 28 August 21 19:14:59 Greenwich Mean Time In autocracies, it is unwise to be rich unless it is the government that made you rich. And if this is the case, it is important to be loyal beyond all else. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1895-96 | Added on Sunday, 29 August 21 09:04:42 Greenwich Mean Time In practice, the only leverage lenders have over nations is to cut them off from future credit. Nevertheless, this has a profound effect, as the ability to engage in borrowing in financial markets is valuable. For this reason nations generally pay their debt. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1911-12 | Added on Sunday, 29 August 21 09:08:30 Greenwich Mean Time But people who argue for debt forgiveness construct their arguments in terms of how they think the world should operate, rather than how it actually works. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 1963-64 | Added on Sunday, 29 August 21 14:11:31 Greenwich Mean Time the real task of governing: allocating money to keep the coalition happy—but not too happy—and providing just enough to keep the interchangeables from rising up in revolt. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2067 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 13:35:30 Greenwich Mean Time From a leader’s point of view, the most important function of the people is to pay taxes. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2082 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 13:37:48 Greenwich Mean Time Leaders who spend on public welfare at the expense of their essentials are courting disaster. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 955-59 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 19:10:30 Greenwich Mean Time The common people who saw this were disturbed by such a blustering show of confidence on election day. And then Coriolanus spoke again, mostly addressing the wealthy citizens who had accompanied him. His words were arrogant and insolent. Claiming certain victory in the vote, he boasted of his battlefield exploits, made sour jokes that appealed only to the patricians, voiced angry accusations against his opponents, and speculated on the riches he would bring to Rome. This time the people listened: They had not realized that this legendary soldier was also a common braggart. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 979-82 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 19:14:12 Greenwich Mean Time Coriolanus did appear one last time before the people, who listened to him in rapt silence. He started slowly and softly, but as the speech went on, he became more and more blunt. Yet again he hurled insults! His tone was arrogant, his expression disdainful. The more he spoke, the angrier the people became. Finally they shouted him down and silenced him. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 991-92 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 19:15:32 Greenwich Mean Time The more Coriolanus said, the less powerful he appeared—a person who cannot control his words shows that he cannot control himself, and is unworthy of respect. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1029-32 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 19:21:30 Greenwich Mean Time Power is in many ways a game of appearances, and when you say less than necessary, you inevitably appear greater and more powerful than you are. Your silence will make other people uncomfortable. Humans are machines of interpretation and explanation; they have to know what you are thinking. When you carefully control what you reveal, they cannot pierce your intentions or your meaning. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1041-43 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 19:23:16 Greenwich Mean Time He claimed to have learned this technique from that master of enigma Marcel Duchamp, another twentieth-century artist who realized early on that the less he said about his work, the more people talked about it. And the more they talked, the more valuable his work became. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1069-71 | Added on Tuesday, 31 August 21 19:28:08 Greenwich Mean Time The verbose are not perceived as sly and manipulative but as helpless and unsophisticated. This is the reverse of the silent policy employed by the powerful: By talking more, and making yourself appear weaker and less intelligent than your mark, you can practice deception with greater ease. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1207-8 | Added on Wednesday, 1 September 21 19:26:13 Greenwich Mean Time When any state threatened to become dominant, its neighbors formed a coalition—not in pursuit of a theory of international relations but out of pure self-interest to block the ambitions of the most powerful. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2439-40 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 17:35:25 Greenwich Mean Time successful rulers pay more than anyone else for just such purposes and, needless to say, not a penny more than that. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1145-46 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:32:15 Greenwich Mean Time Barnum used two different tactics to ruin Peale’s reputation. The first was simple: He sowed doubts about the museum’s stability and solvency. Doubt is a powerful weapon: ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1149-50 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:32:50 Greenwich Mean Time the sowing of rumors can so infuriate and unsettle your rivals that in defending themselves they will make numerous mistakes. This is the perfect weapon for those who have no reputation of their own to work from. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1152-56 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:34:57 Greenwich Mean Time Once you have a solid base of respect, ridiculing your opponent both puts him on the defensive and draws more attention to you, enhancing your own reputation. Outright slander and insult are too strong at this point; they are ugly, and may hurt you more than help you. But gentle barbs and mockery suggest that you have a strong enough sense of your own worth to enjoy a good laugh at your rival’s expense. A humorous front can make you out as a harmless entertainer while poking holes in the reputation of your rival. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1185-86 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:38:23 Greenwich Mean Time your reputation inevitably precedes you, and if it inspires respect, a lot of your work is done for you before you arrive on the scene, or utter a single word. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1199-1202 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:42:05 Greenwich Mean Time Reputation is a treasure to be carefully collected and hoarded. Especially when you are first establishing it, you must protect it strictly, anticipating all attacks on it. Once it is solid, do not let yourself get angry or defensive at the slanderous comments of your enemies—that reveals insecurity, not confidence in your reputation. Take the high road instead, and never appear desperate in your self-defense. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1214-16 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:44:32 Greenwich Mean Time The lesson is simple—never go too far in attacks like these, for that will draw more attention to your own vengefulness than to the person you are slandering. When your own reputation is solid, use subtler tactics, such as satire and ridicule, to weaken your opponent while making you out as a charming rogue. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1224-27 | Added on Monday, 6 September 21 19:46:36 Greenwich Mean Time not caring what others think of you, you gain a reputation for insolence and arrogance, but that can be a valuable image in itself—Oscar Wilde used it to great advantage. Since we must live in society and must depend on the opinions of others, there is nothing to be gained by neglecting your reputation. By not caring how you are perceived, you let others decide this for you. Be the master of your fate, and also of your reputation. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1336-38 | Added on Wednesday, 8 September 21 19:15:34 Greenwich Mean Time Once in the limelight you must constantly renew it by adapting and varying your method of courting attention. If you don’t, the public will grow tired, will take you for granted, and will move on to a newer star. The game requires constant vigilance and creativity. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1455-56 | Added on Thursday, 9 September 21 18:39:17 Greenwich Mean Time when you explain, be not too explicit.... In this manner you imitate the Divine way when you cause men to wonder and watch. ========== Power of Ignored Skills : Change the way you think and decide (Manoj Tripathi) - Highlight on Page 58 | Loc. 583-84 | Added on Thursday, 9 September 21 19:07:25 Greenwich Mean Time “85 percent of your financial success is due to your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent, due to the technical knowledge you have.” ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2572-73 | Added on Friday, 10 September 21 19:20:57 Greenwich Mean Time How about handing out vouchers on the basis of need? It turns out that productivity is linked to the odds of getting vouchers and to their worth—but it is the higher productivity districts that do better, not the ones needing help improving their productivity. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2588-94 | Added on Friday, 10 September 21 19:26:18 Greenwich Mean Time Though private rewards can be provided directly out of the government’s treasury, the easiest way to compensate the police for their loyalty—including their willingness to oppress their fellow citizens—is to give them free rein to be corrupt. Pay them so little that they can’t help but realize it is not only acceptable but necessary for them to be corrupt. Then they will be doubly beholden to the regime: first, they will be grateful for the wealth the regime lets them accumulate; second, they will understand that if they waver in loyalty, they are at risk of losing their privileges and being prosecuted. Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky? He used to be the richest man in Russia. We do not know whether he was corrupt or not, but we do know that he was not loyal to the Putin government and duly found himself prosecuted for corruption. Police face the same threat. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2612-14 | Added on Friday, 10 September 21 19:34:10 Greenwich Mean Time Corruption is a private good of choice for exactly the reasons captured by the Dymovsky Affair. It provides the means to ensure regime loyalty without having to pay good salaries, and it guarantees the prosecutorial means to ferret out any beneficiaries who fail to remain loyal. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2620-21 | Added on Saturday, 11 September 21 03:49:20 Greenwich Mean Time in a nutshell, is what private rewards are all about—physical and political survival; not larger social objectives. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2776-77 | Added on Saturday, 11 September 21 18:58:35 Greenwich Mean Time Castellano rewarded himself at the expense of his supporters and it cost him his life. A few thousand years earlier, Julius Caesar’s mistake was to help the people at the expense of his backers and this too cost him his life. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2892-93 | Added on Saturday, 11 September 21 19:22:56 Greenwich Mean Time Lee’s approach was vastly more civilized than Deng’s, but nevertheless it was the arbitrary and tough use of power dictated by the logic of political survival. And that, in the end, is what politics is all about. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 2953-54 | Added on Tuesday, 14 September 21 05:28:29 Greenwich Mean Time successful autocrat, Selassie knew not to put the needs of the people above the wants of his essential supporters. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 3239-40 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 08:51:54 Greenwich Mean Time A UNSC seat gives leaders valuable favors to sell in the form of their vote on the Security Council, and the aid they receive results in worse performance for their economy. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1537-38 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 10:03:03 Greenwich Mean Time The lesson is twofold: First, the credit for an invention or creation is as important, if not more important, than the invention itself. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1539-41 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 10:03:47 Greenwich Mean Time To accomplish this you must always be vigilant and ruthless, keeping your creation quiet until you can be sure there are no vultures circling overhead. Second, learn to take advantage of other people’s work to further your own cause. Time is precious and life is short. If you try to do it all on your own, you run yourself ragged, waste energy, and burn yourself out. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1597-98 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 10:15:35 Greenwich Mean Time Kissinger played the game expertly: He took credit for the work of those below him while graciously giving credit for his own labors to those above. That is the way to play the game. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1648-50 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 19:14:05 Greenwich Mean Time Your idea of power is wrong. You have mistaken aggressive action for effective action. And most often the most effective action is to stay back, keep calm, and let others be frustrated by the traps you lay for them, playing for long-term power rather than quick victory. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1652-54 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 19:15:26 Greenwich Mean Time When you make other people come to you, you suddenly become the one controlling the situation. And the one who has control has power. Two things must happen to place you in this position: You yourself must learn to master your emotions, and never to be influenced by anger; meanwhile, however, you must play on people’s natural tendency to react angrily when pushed and baited. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1692 | Added on Thursday, 16 September 21 19:21:53 Greenwich Mean Time The person who makes others come to him appears powerful, and demands respect. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 3444-46 | Added on Friday, 17 September 21 18:34:35 Greenwich Mean Time Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown in 1893. Her sin? She wanted Hawaii and Hawaiians (no doubt including herself) to profit from the exploitation of farming and export opportunities pursued by large American and European firms operating in Hawaii. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 3450-53 | Added on Friday, 17 September 21 18:36:17 Greenwich Mean Time this policy of reluctance to promote democracy at work for the US in the Gulf. The United States has a long history of supporting useful autocrats. Indeed, US policy in that part of the world stands as a perfect example of the perils of democratization. The incipient democracies in the Gulf are unlikely to be positively inclined toward US interests, in part because of deep policy differences and in part because we’ve been funding for decades the oppression under which they were governed. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 3470 | Added on Friday, 17 September 21 18:39:31 Greenwich Mean Time Aid is a tool for buying influence and policy. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 3538-41 | Added on Saturday, 18 September 21 19:28:37 Greenwich Mean Time Leaders know that as isolated individuals the people are no threat to their government. That is precisely why government leaders are reluctant to let people freely assemble and organize against them. If the people find a way to take to the streets en masse, the incumbent will certainly need very loyal supporters willing to undertake the decidedly dirty work of suppressing the masses if he is to survive. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 3554-56 | Added on Saturday, 18 September 21 19:32:41 Greenwich Mean Time Revolutionary movements may seem spontaneous but we really need to understand that they arise when enough citizens believe they have a realistic chance of success. That is why successful autocrats make rebellion truly unattractive. They step in quickly to punish harshly those who first take to the streets. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4249-51 | Added on Saturday, 25 September 21 19:40:36 Greenwich Mean Time Unless they are defeated by a democracy seeking policy concessions, autocrats can generally survive military defeat provided that they preserve their resources. Autocrats even survive if their loss involves huge causalities. In contrast, even in victory democrats are liable to be deposed if they get lots of soldiers killed in the process. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4264-66 | Added on Saturday, 25 September 21 19:43:43 Greenwich Mean Time the real-life Barre bluntly stated, “I believe neither in Islam, nor socialism nor tribalism, nor Somali nationalism, nor pan-Africanism. The ideology to which I am committed is the ideology of political survival.”14 ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4338-39 | Added on Saturday, 25 September 21 19:57:56 Greenwich Mean Time Democrats remove foreign leaders who are troublesome to them and replace them with puppets. The leaders that rise to the top after an invasion are more often than not handpicked by the victor. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4339-40 | Added on Sunday, 26 September 21 04:43:08 Greenwich Mean Time A difficult leader whom democrats don’t trust to honor an agreement will often find himself replaced. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4403-5 | Added on Sunday, 26 September 21 05:17:28 Greenwich Mean Time First among these is that we should never let the quest for perfection block the way to lesser improvement. Utopian dreams of a perfect world are just that: utopian. Pursuing the perfect world for everyone is a waste of time and an excuse for not doing the hard work of making the world better for many. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4534-35 | Added on Sunday, 26 September 21 19:39:26 Greenwich Mean Time coalition members should beware of their susceptibility to purges. Remember that it ticks up when there is a new boss, a dying boss, or a bankrupt boss. ========== The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith) - Highlight Loc. 4874-76 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 03:49:16 Greenwich Mean Time Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want them to be free and prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and our well-being—and that is as it should be. That too is a rule to rule by for democratic leaders. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1765-67 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 04:40:01 Greenwich Mean Time The Arguer does not understand that words are never neutral, and that by arguing with a superior he impugns the intelligence of one more powerful than he. He also has no awareness of the person he is dealing with. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1789-94 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 04:46:31 Greenwich Mean Time Michelangelo knew that by changing the shape of the nose he might ruin the entire sculpture. Yet Soderini was a patron who prided himself on his aesthetic judgment. To offend such a man by arguing would not only gain Michelangelo nothing, it would put future commissions in jeopardy. Michelangelo was too clever to argue. His solution was to change Soderini’s perspective (literally bringing him closer to the nose) without making him realize that this was the cause of his misperception. Fortunately for posterity, Michelangelo found a way to keep the perfection of the statue intact while at the same time making Soderini believe he had improved it. Such is the double power of winning through actions rather than argument: No one is offended, and your point is proven. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1805-8 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 04:48:56 Greenwich Mean Time In the realm of power you must learn to judge your moves by their long-term effects on other people. The problem in trying to prove a point or gain a victory through argument is that in the end you can never be certain how it affects the people you’re arguing with: They may appear to agree with you politely, but inside they may resent you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1814-15 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 04:50:13 Greenwich Mean Time “The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1824-25 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 04:52:13 Greenwich Mean Time The power of demonstrating your idea is that your opponents do not get defensive, and are therefore more open to persuasion. Making them literally and physically feel your meaning is infinitely more powerful than argument. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1829-31 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 04:54:36 Greenwich Mean Time Instead of just arguing that anyone facing Stalin was afraid, knowing that the slightest sign of rebellion would mean certain death, he had made them feel what it was like to face Stalin—had made them feel the paranoia, the fear of speaking up, the terror of confronting the leader, in this case Khrushchev. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1855-56 | Added on Tuesday, 28 September 21 05:03:15 Greenwich Mean Time Never argue. In society nothing must be discussed; give only results. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 1913-14 | Added on Wednesday, 29 September 21 07:06:40 Greenwich Mean Time Ludwig was, in his own words, “bewitched” by Lola. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2015-16 | Added on Wednesday, 29 September 21 07:36:34 Greenwich Mean Time Never teach them enough so that they can do without you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2072-73 | Added on Wednesday, 29 September 21 19:38:20 Greenwich Mean Time Bismarck saw different. Joining forces with the powerful can be foolish: They will swallow you up, ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2076-77 | Added on Wednesday, 29 September 21 19:40:15 Greenwich Mean Time Necessity rules the world. People rarely act unless compelled to. If you create no need for yourself, then you will be done away with at first opportunity. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2201-2 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 12:37:26 Greenwich Mean Time Lustig understood that a man like Capone spends his life mistrusting others. No one around him is honest or generous, and being so much in the company of wolves is exhausting, even depressing. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2215-18 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 12:39:43 Greenwich Mean Time It is also dangerous simply to ask for what you need, no matter how politely: Unless the other person sees some gain for themselves, they may come to resent your neediness. Learn to give before you take. It softens the ground, takes the bite out of a future request, or simply creates a distraction. And the giving can take many forms: an actual gift, a generous act, a kind favor, an “honest” admission—whatever it takes. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2263-64 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 12:48:46 Greenwich Mean Time Selective kindness will often break down even the most stubborn foe: Aiming right for the heart, it corrodes the will to fight back. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2364-65 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 18:59:29 Greenwich Mean Time There is an art to asking for help, an art that depends on your ability to understand the person you are dealing with, and to not confuse your needs with theirs. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2378-80 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 19:01:44 Greenwich Mean Time Do not be subtle: You have valuable knowledge to share, you will fill his coffers with gold, you will make him live longer and happier. This is a language that all of us speak and understand. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2394-95 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 19:03:59 Greenwich Mean Time At each step on the way to acquiring power, you must train yourself to think your way inside the other person’s mind, to see their needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your own feelings that obscure the truth. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2414-15 | Added on Thursday, 30 September 21 19:07:52 Greenwich Mean Time Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2480-83 | Added on Friday, 1 October 21 18:39:45 Greenwich Mean Time Another trick was identified by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who suggested vehemently contradicting people you’re in conversation with as a way of irritating them, stirring them up so that they lose some of the control over their words. In their emotional reaction they will reveal all kinds of truths about themselves, truths you can later use against them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2505-6 | Added on Friday, 1 October 21 18:44:31 Greenwich Mean Time “Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2681-82 | Added on Saturday, 2 October 21 18:40:53 Greenwich Mean Time If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2702-6 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 03:56:35 Greenwich Mean Time Guillelma sent messengers to Guillaume to find out what had happened, but he turned the messengers away. He thought all this would make her angry, forcing him to plead for reconciliation as Pierre had. Instead, however, his absence had the opposite effect: It made Guillelma love him all the more. Now the lady pursued her knight, sending messengers and love notes of her own. This was almost unheard of—a lady never pursued her troubadour. And Guillaume did not like it. Guillelma’s forwardness made him feel she had lost some of her dignity. Not only was he no longer sure of his plan, he was no longer sure of his lady. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2741-42 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 04:01:59 Greenwich Mean Time Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2784-85 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 04:13:16 Greenwich Mean Time At the right moment you must learn to withdraw yourself before they unconsciously push you away. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2789 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 04:13:56 Greenwich Mean Time “Love never dies of starvation,” she wrote, “but often of indigestion.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2830-32 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 04:28:23 Greenwich Mean Time In love and seduction, similarly, absence is only effective once you have surrounded the other with your image, been seen by him or her everywhere. Everything must remind your lover of your presence, so that when you do choose to be away, the lover will always be thinking of you, will always be seeing you in his or her mind’s eye. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 2836-38 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 04:31:31 Greenwich Mean Time Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize. ========== Wisdom for the Way (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 133-36 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 10:32:39 Greenwich Mean Time The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 194 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 12:26:32 Greenwich Mean Time The end of man is action and not thought, though it be of the noblest.  ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3062-65 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 14:35:20 Greenwich Mean Time The danger for most people comes when they feel threatened. In such times they tend to retreat and close ranks, to find security in a kind of fortress. In doing so, however, they come to rely for information on a smaller and smaller circle, and lose perspective on events around them. They lose maneuverability and become easy targets, and their isolation makes them paranoid. As in warfare and most games of strategy, isolation often precedes defeat and death. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3192-96 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 19:07:27 Greenwich Mean Time Never assume that the person you are dealing with is weaker or less important than you are. Some men are slow to take offense, which may make you misjudge the thickness of their skin, and fail to worry about insulting them. But should you offend their honor and their pride, they will overwhelm you with a violence that seems sudden and extreme given their slowness to anger. If you want to turn people down, it is best to do so politely and respectfully, even if you feel their request is impudent or their offer ridiculous. Never reject them with an insult until you know them better; ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3219-20 | Added on Sunday, 3 October 21 19:11:12 Greenwich Mean Time After five years of hunting, Norfleet had single-handedly destroyed the country’s largest confederation of con artists. The effort bankrupted him and ruined his marriage, but he died a satisfied man. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3271-75 | Added on Monday, 4 October 21 03:35:35 Greenwich Mean Time The ability to measure people and to know who you’re dealing with is the most important skill of all in gathering and conserving power. Without it you are blind: Not only will you offend the wrong people, you will choose the wrong types to work on, and will think you are flattering people when you are actually insulting them. Before embarking on any move, take the measure of your mark or potential opponent. Otherwise you will waste time and make mistakes. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 330-31 | Added on Monday, 4 October 21 04:03:41 Greenwich Mean Time The Moment is freedom. - I couldn't live by a rigid schedule. I try to live freely from moment to moment, letting things happen and adjusting to them. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 470-71 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:03:04 Greenwich Mean Time Most people can talk without listening. Very few can listen without talking. It is very rare that people can talk and listen. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 497-99 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:08:34 Greenwich Mean Time Do not expend power prematurely. - Wait in the calm strength of patience - he that is strong should guard it with tenderness. One need not fear lest strong will should not prevail; the main thing is not to expend one's powers prematurely in an attempt to obtain by force something for which the time is not yet ripe. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 508 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:10:38 Greenwich Mean Time Don't seek, but allow. - Do not seek IT, for it will come when least expected. Let go. Don't seek or run away. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 545-46 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:17:52 Greenwich Mean Time [To] bring the mind into sharp focus and to make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere, the mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought process, and even ordinary thought itself. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3349-50 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:30:45 Greenwich Mean Time He made promises to every side but committed to none, and in the end he held all the cards. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3364-67 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:34:16 Greenwich Mean Time By maintaining a little distance he thrived in turbulent times. Those who use this strategy often notice a strange phenomenon: People who rush to the support of others tend to gain little respect in the process, for their help is so easily obtained, while those who stand back find themselves besieged with supplicants. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3424-26 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:46:09 Greenwich Mean Time Even while Isabella was charming Cesare, she convinced everyone around her to take care never to utter a harsh word about him, since he had spies everywhere and would use the slightest pretext for invasion. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3516 | Added on Tuesday, 5 October 21 18:58:25 Greenwich Mean Time He well knew that only fools rush into a situation—that by committing too quickly you lose your maneuverability. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 566-69 | Added on Thursday, 7 October 21 19:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time Subconscious mind. - recognising the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to submit to it a clear and definite picture of my Major Purpose in life and all minor purposes leading to my major purpose, and I shall keep this picture constantly before my subconscious mind by repeating it daily! ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3716-17 | Added on Friday, 8 October 21 03:18:06 Greenwich Mean Time Never sacrifice that time in exchange for honor in a battle that you cannot win. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3752-54 | Added on Friday, 8 October 21 03:26:28 Greenwich Mean Time The author’s elusive answers baffled the committee members, but his politeness and the way he yielded to their authority made it impossible for them to get angry with him. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3763-65 | Added on Friday, 8 October 21 03:28:46 Greenwich Mean Time People trying to make a show of their authority are easily deceived by the surrender tactic. Your outward sign of submission makes them feel important; satisfied that you respect them, they become easier targets for a later counterattack, ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3773-74 | Added on Friday, 8 October 21 03:30:41 Greenwich Mean Time By yielding, you in fact control the situation, because your surrender is part of a larger plan to lull them into believing they have defeated you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 3977-79 | Added on Saturday, 9 October 21 05:25:08 Greenwich Mean Time Great courtiers are gracious and polite; their aggression is veiled and indirect. Masters of the word, they never say more than necessary, getting the most out of a compliment or hidden insult. They are magnets of pleasure—people want to be around them because they know how to please, yet they neither fawn nor humiliate themselves. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4018-22 | Added on Saturday, 9 October 21 05:34:13 Greenwich Mean Time Alter Your Style and Language According to the Person You Are Dealing With. The pseudo-belief in equality—the idea that talking and acting the same way with everyone, no matter what their rank, makes you somehow a paragon of civilization—is a terrible mistake. Those below you will take it as a form of condescension, which it is, and those above you will be offended, although they may not admit it. You must change your style and your way of speaking to suit each person. This is not lying, it is acting, and acting is an art, not a gift from God. Learn the art. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4074-75 | Added on Saturday, 9 October 21 18:06:26 Greenwich Mean Time Never be so self-absorbed as to believe that the master is interested in your criticisms of him, no matter how accurate they are. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4103-4 | Added on Saturday, 9 October 21 18:13:36 Greenwich Mean Time As a young man, Mansart had seen how many royal craftsmen in the service of Louis XIV had lost their positions not through a lack of talent but through a costly social blunder. He would not make that mistake. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4193-94 | Added on Saturday, 9 October 21 18:28:00 Greenwich Mean Time How many of the great have been felled by envious colleagues! Better temporarily to dull your brilliance than to suffer the slings and arrows of envy. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 785-86 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 15:16:26 Greenwich Mean Time Anger should be expressed. - Any anger that is not coming out, flowing freely, will turn into sadism, power drive, stammering, and other means of torturing. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 858-59 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 15:41:41 Greenwich Mean Time Let friendships develop on their own. - Let friendship creep gently to a height; if it rushes to it, it may soon run itself out of breath. Love and respect. - Without respect, love cannot go long. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 861 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 15:42:17 Greenwich Mean Time Kindness and remembrance. - A person cannot forget someone who is good to them. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1028-30 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 16:14:57 Greenwich Mean Time Sincere students are rare. - Sincere and serious learners are difficult to come by. Many of them are five minute enthusiasts, some of them come in with ill intentions, but unfortunately, most of them are second-hand artists; basically conformers. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1059-61 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 16:22:40 Greenwich Mean Time Poverty and peace. - Any poor country or person is hostile while they are down. If you have nothing, you can afford to be hostile. But wait until they, too, become more prosperous. They will soon quiet down and want peace just like the rest of the world. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1091-92 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 16:27:14 Greenwich Mean Time Never waste energy on worries and negative thoughts. - I mean who has the most insecure job as I have? What do I live on? My faith in my ability that I'll make it. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1094-95 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 16:27:29 Greenwich Mean Time Anxiery is a defense. - Don't be forecasting evil unless it is what you can guard against. Anxiety is good for nothing if we can't turn it into a defense. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1126-28 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 16:36:04 Greenwich Mean Time Don’t add worry to your troubles. - Serene, detached from all results, ready to fight or run, to win or lose, and always ready to laugh at all things, take whatever comes. Your child is ill you say, or you cannot pay the rent? Very well, accept these facts and face them. Are they not trouble enough in themselves without adding the aggravation of worry to them? ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1133-36 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 16:39:19 Greenwich Mean Time Learn to walk on. - Why add the tension of emotion/ thought to a situation which is illusion, to the extent that it is real, of a passing moment (in any event, the result of previous causes)? Do what seems wise to be done, forget it, and walk on. Walk on and see a new view. Walk on and see the birds fly. Walk on and leave behind all things that would dam up the inlet, or clog the outlet, of experience. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1274-76 | Added on Sunday, 10 October 21 18:39:23 Greenwich Mean Time Stumbling blocks and stepping stones. - Are you going to make your obstacles stepping stones to your dreams, or stumbling blocks because unknowingly you let negativeness, worries, fear, etc., take over you? ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1288 | Added on Monday, 11 October 21 18:48:08 Greenwich Mean Time Don't fear failure. -Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1317-18 | Added on Monday, 11 October 21 18:54:13 Greenwich Mean Time Success means doing something sincerely and whole-heartedly. And you have to have the help of other people to achieve it. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1327-28 | Added on Monday, 11 October 21 18:57:10 Greenwich Mean Time The price of success.- He who wants to succeed should learn how to fight, to strive, and to suffer. You can acquire a lot in life, if you are prepared to give up a lot to get it. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1437-39 | Added on Monday, 11 October 21 19:15:59 Greenwich Mean Time The true artist has no public. - The true artist has no public; he works for the sheer joy of it, with an element of playfulness, of casualness. Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1495-97 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 10:26:32 Greenwich Mean Time Keep your mind uncontaminated by past conditioning. - The more and more you're aware, the more and more you shed from day to day what you have learned so that your mind is always fresh, uncontaminated by previous conditioning. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1551-55 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 10:38:40 Greenwich Mean Time A choice method imprisons the mind. - A choice method, however exacting, fixes the mind in a pattern. A choice method is the cultivation of resistance, and where there is resistance there is no understanding. A well-disciplined mind is not a free mind. Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it. The creating individual is more important than any system. - Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1559-61 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 10:39:49 Greenwich Mean Time Organised institutes produce prisoners of concepts. - I no longer am interested in systems or organisation. Organised institutes tend to produce patternised prisoners of a systematised concept, and the instructors are often fixed in a routine. Of course what is worse is that by imposing the members to fit a lifeless preformation, their natural growth is blocked. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1983-84 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 14:04:57 Greenwich Mean Time Determining truth in beliefs. -A belief is true if and only if one can act on it without upsetting one's expectation. ========== Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2035-37 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 14:17:01 Greenwich Mean Time Emptiness - the end. - I have to leave now, my friend. You have a long journey ahead of you, and you must travel light. From now on drop all your burden of preconceived conclusions behind, and "open" yourself to everything and everyone ahead. Remember, my friend, the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 540-42 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 18:26:39 Greenwich Mean Time “Loong, preserve yourself by following the natural bends of things and don’t interfere. Remember never to assert yourself against nature; never be in frontal opposition to any problems, but control it by swinging with it. Don’t practice this week. Go home and think about it.” ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 551-52 | Added on Tuesday, 12 October 21 18:27:54 Greenwich Mean Time Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4449-52 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 06:43:07 Greenwich Mean Time Occasional mistakes are inevitable—the world is just too unpredictable. People of power, however, are undone not by the mistakes they make, but by the way they deal with them. Like surgeons, they must cut away the tumor with speed and finality. Excuses and apologies are much too blunt tools for this delicate operation; the powerful avoid them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4513-15 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 06:55:20 Greenwich Mean Time it is often wise to choose the most innocent victim possible as a sacrificial goat. Such people will not be powerful enough to fight you, and their naive protests may be seen as protesting too much—may be seen, in other words, as a sign of their guilt. Be careful, however, not to create a martyr. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4522-23 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 06:57:34 Greenwich Mean Time The king, meanwhile, would rid himself of a man who by that time had probably learned too much about him, perhaps becoming arrogant and even disdainful of him. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4646-47 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 07:17:31 Greenwich Mean Time To silence their cackle, should you hand out rough Punishment? Maybe you’re not strong enough. Better persuade them to attack Somebody else, who can more than pay them back. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4690-91 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 07:23:39 Greenwich Mean Time One should not be too straightforward. Go and see the forest. The straight trees are cut down, the crooked ones are left standing. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4690-91 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 07:24:03 Greenwich Mean Time One should not be too straightforward. Go and see the forest. The straight trees are cut down, the crooked ones are left standing. Kautilya, Indian philosopher, third century B.C. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 4829-32 | Added on Wednesday, 13 October 21 18:05:32 Greenwich Mean Time Most people’s problems have complex causes: deep-rooted neurosis, interconnected social factors, roots that go way back in time and are exceedingly hard to unravel. Few, however, have the patience to deal with this; most people want to hear that a simple solution will cure their problems. The ability to offer this kind of solution will give you great power and build you a following. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5086-89 | Added on Thursday, 14 October 21 09:50:31 Greenwich Mean Time If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5104-6 | Added on Thursday, 14 October 21 09:53:37 Greenwich Mean Time Great enterprises are only achieved by adventurous spirits. They who calculate with too great nicety every difficulty and obstacle which is likely to lie in their way, lose that time in hesitation, which the more daring seize and render available to the loftiest purposes. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5213-16 | Added on Thursday, 14 October 21 15:56:13 Greenwich Mean Time The world is full of boyars—men who despise you, fear your ambition, and jealously guard their shrinking realms of power. You need to establish your authority and gain respect, but the moment the boyars sense your growing boldness, they will act to thwart you. This is how Ivan met such a situation: He lay low, showing neither ambition nor discontent. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5435-36 | Added on Friday, 15 October 21 10:26:23 Greenwich Mean Time Experience shows that, if one foresees from far away the designs to be undertaken, one can act with speed when the moment comes to execute them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5458-60 | Added on Friday, 15 October 21 10:30:18 Greenwich Mean Time “The most ordinary cause of people’s mistakes,” Cardinal de Retz later wrote, “is their being too much frightened at the present danger, and not enough so at that which is remote.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5602-3 | Added on Saturday, 16 October 21 06:01:33 Greenwich Mean Time Keep the extent of your abilities unknown. The wise man does not allow his knowledge and abilities to be sounded to the bottom, if he desires to be honored by all. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5623-24 | Added on Saturday, 16 October 21 06:03:47 Greenwich Mean Time Keep your effort and your tricks to yourself and you seem to have the grace and ease of a god. One never sees the source of a god’s power revealed; one only sees its effects. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5663-64 | Added on Saturday, 16 October 21 06:08:53 Greenwich Mean Time Learn to control this propensity to blab, for its effect is often the opposite of what you expected. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5808 | Added on Sunday, 17 October 21 19:03:24 Greenwich Mean Time Setting up a narrow range of choices, then, should always be a part of your deceptions. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5812-14 | Added on Sunday, 17 October 21 19:04:27 Greenwich Mean Time if he tried to determine policy, he would offend or perhaps enrage a notoriously insecure man. So Kissinger would propose three or four choices of action for each situation, and would present them in such a way that the one he preferred always seemed the best solution compared to the others. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5842-44 | Added on Sunday, 17 October 21 19:08:01 Greenwich Mean Time This tactic is similar to “Color the Choices,” but with the weak you have to be more aggressive. Work on their emotions—use fear and terror to propel them into action. Try reason and they will always find a way to procrastinate. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5868-69 | Added on Sunday, 17 October 21 19:12:39 Greenwich Mean Time Even as a general rule, however, it is rarely wise to be seen as exerting power directly and forcefully, no matter how secure or strong you are. It is usually more elegant and more effective to give people the illusion of choice. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5876-79 | Added on Sunday, 17 October 21 19:14:12 Greenwich Mean Time The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5928 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 05:28:28 Greenwich Mean Time Bragadino had only scorn for the doubters, but he responded to them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5956-58 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 05:34:21 Greenwich Mean Time To gain power, you must be a source of pleasure for those around you—and pleasure comes from playing to people’s fantasies. Never promise a gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5963 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 05:35:21 Greenwich Mean Time It is the oppressiveness of reality that allows fantasy to take root and bloom. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 5997-98 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 05:40:18 Greenwich Mean Time Another form of the fantasy of the exotic is simply the hope for relief from boredom. Con artists love to play on the oppressiveness of the working world, its lack of adventure. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6046-47 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 05:48:22 Greenwich Mean Time Should you play with such a fantasy, you too must carefully cultivate distance and not allow your “common” persona to become too familiar or it will not project as fantasy. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6248-49 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 18:13:41 Greenwich Mean Time A man’s need to conquer women actually reveals a tremendous helplessness that has made suckers out of them for thousands of years. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6300-6301 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 18:24:17 Greenwich Mean Time Bismarck knew he had to get to the king before it was too late. He also knew he had blundered, and should have tempered his fiery words. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1294-98 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 18:39:21 Greenwich Mean Time I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1399-1403 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 18:55:57 Greenwich Mean Time Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are so busy PROJECTING themselves as this or that. This is again the curse of the ideal. The curse is that you should not be what you are. Every external control, even internalized external control—“you should”—interferes with the healthy working of the organism. There is only one thing that should control the situation. If you understand the situation that you are in, and let the situation that you are in control your actions, then you learn how to cope with life. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1426-28 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 18:57:22 Greenwich Mean Time Thinking is rehearsing in fantasy for the role you have to play in society. And when it comes to the moment of performance, and you’re not sure whether your performance will be well received, then you get stage fright. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1440-44 | Added on Wednesday, 20 October 21 19:01:47 Greenwich Mean Time MATURATION IS THE DEVELOPMENT FROM ENVIRONMENTAL SUPPORT TO SELF-SUPPORT. However the neurotic child will use his potential, not for self-support but to act out phony roles. These phony roles are meant to mobilize the environment for support instead of mobilizing one’s own potential. We manipulate the environment by being helpless, by staying stupid, asking questions, wheedling flattering—the result is that we come to the sticking point or the impasse. The impasse occurs when we cannot produce our own support and when environmental support is not forthcoming. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6350-51 | Added on Thursday, 21 October 21 04:40:49 Greenwich Mean Time Once the king had made news by treating the banker as an equal; now the banker treated the king as an inferior. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6366-67 | Added on Thursday, 21 October 21 04:44:20 Greenwich Mean Time Louis-Philippe consciously dissolved the aura that naturally pertains to kings and leaders. Scoffing at the symbolism of grandeur, he believed a new world was dawning, where rulers should act and be like ordinary citizens. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6380-81 | Added on Thursday, 21 October 21 04:48:21 Greenwich Mean Time Leaders who try to dissolve that distance through a false chumminess gradually lose the ability to inspire loyalty, fear, or love. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6449-50 | Added on Thursday, 21 October 21 19:02:09 Greenwich Mean Time It is within your power to set your own price. How you carry yourself reflects what you think of yourself. If you ask for little, shuffle your feet and lower your head, people will assume this reflects your character. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6492-95 | Added on Thursday, 21 October 21 19:09:25 Greenwich Mean Time First, the Columbus Strategy: Always make a bold demand. Set your price high and do not waver. Second, in a dignified way, go after the highest person in the building. This immediately puts you on the same plane as the chief executive you are attacking. It is the David and Goliath Strategy: By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6528-29 | Added on Thursday, 21 October 21 19:16:39 Greenwich Mean Time Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1852-55 | Added on Friday, 22 October 21 19:26:42 Greenwich Mean Time Jeet kune do is training and discipline toward the ultimate reality in combat. The ultimate reality is returning to one’s primary freedom, which is simple, direct, and nonclassical. A good jeet kune do man does not oppose force or give way completely. He is pliable as a spring; he is the complement and not the opposition to his opponent’s strength. He has no technique; he makes his opponent’s techniques his technique. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1862-63 | Added on Friday, 22 October 21 19:27:53 Greenwich Mean Time To be is to be related. To isolate is death. Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease, when the mind is obsessed with it. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 1962-64 | Added on Friday, 22 October 21 19:46:15 Greenwich Mean Time To live is a constant process of relating, so please cease all that mental chattering, come on out of that protective shell of isolation, that proud conclusion, or whatever, and relate DIRECTLY to what is being said. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2006-7 | Added on Friday, 22 October 21 19:51:17 Greenwich Mean Time Thus any special technique, however classically correct or cleverly designed, is in reality a disease, should one become obsessed with it. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2131-33 | Added on Friday, 22 October 21 20:04:28 Greenwich Mean Time The student seldom learns to depend upon himself for expression. Instead, he faithfully or blindly follows an instructor, the authority figure, and his instructor’s imposed pattern. That way, the student feels he is no longer alone and finds security in mass imitation. However, what is nurtured is the dependent mind rather than independent inquiry, which is so essential to genuine understanding. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2267-68 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 08:20:30 Greenwich Mean Time A teacher, a really good teacher, functions as a pointer to truth, but not a giver of truth. He employs a minimum of form to lead his student to the formless. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6626-28 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 12:42:03 Greenwich Mean Time First, it is critical to recognize the spirit of the times. Fouché always looked two steps ahead, found the wave that would carry him to power, and rode it. You must always work with the times, anticipate twists and turns, and never miss the boat. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6634-35 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 12:43:25 Greenwich Mean Time When the times were against Fouché, he did not struggle, get emotional, or strike out rashly. He kept his cool and maintained a low profile, patiently building support among the citizenry, the bulwark in his next rise to power. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6645 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 12:44:56 Greenwich Mean Time patience that is the principal requirement in the art of timing. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6664-66 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 12:47:41 Greenwich Mean Time When you force the pace out of fear and impatience, you create a nest of problems that require fixing, and you end up taking much longer than if you had taken your time. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6703-4 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 12:59:06 Greenwich Mean Time Making people wait is a powerful way of forcing time, as long as they do not figure out what you are up to. You control the clock, they linger in limbo—and rapidly come unglued, opening up opportunities for you to strike. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6713-15 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 13:01:05 Greenwich Mean Time The deadline, then, is a powerful tool. Close off the vistas of indecision and force people to make up their damn minds or get to the point never let them make you play on their excruciating terms. Never give them time. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6725-26 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 13:04:14 Greenwich Mean Time Patience is worthless unless combined with a willingness to fall ruthlessly on your opponent at the right moment. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2846-48 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 13:38:30 Greenwich Mean Time To approach jeet kune do with the idea of mastering the will. Forget about winning and losing, forget about pride and pain: let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life! Do not be concerned with your escaping safely—lay down your life before him! ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 2972 | Added on Saturday, 23 October 21 19:10:36 Greenwich Mean Time Being empty means having no appearance: having no style or form to let one’s opponent work on. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6833-36 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 08:01:00 Greenwich Mean Time Henry had his own strategy: He stopped sleeping in the same bed with Catherine, since he considered her his sister-in-law, not his lawful wife. He insisted on calling her Princess Dowager of Wales, her title as Arthur’s widow. Finally, in 1531, he banished her from court and shipped her off to a distant castle. The pope ordered him to return her to court, on pain of excommunication, the most severe penalty a Catholic could suffer. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6843-45 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 08:11:24 Greenwich Mean Time Isolated from the court, ignored by the king, mad with anger and frustration, Catherine slowly deteriorated, and finally died in January of 1536, from a cancerous tumor of the heart. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6845-47 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 08:14:53 Greenwich Mean Time When you pay attention to a person, the two of you become partners of sorts, each moving in step to the actions and reactions of the other. In the process you lose your initiative. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6853-57 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 08:21:26 Greenwich Mean Time And in this view it is advisable to let everyone of your acquaintance—whether man or woman—feel now and then that you could very well dispense with their company. This will consolidate friendship. Nay, with most people there will be no harm in occasionally mixing a grain of disdain with your treatment of them; that will make them value your friendship all the more. Chi non stima vien stimato, as a subtle Italian proverb has it—to disregard is to win regard. But if we really think very highly of a person, we should conceal it from him like a crime. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6912 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 08:31:43 Greenwich Mean Time Crying “sour grapes” is sometimes seen as a reflection of the weak; it is actually the tactic of the powerful. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 6930-31 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 08:36:21 Greenwich Mean Time The emperor had to respond with a similar aristocratic indifference; his anger had made him seem low and petty—an image Dainagon was able to manipulate. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 3437-38 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 17:29:24 Greenwich Mean Time When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 3439-42 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 17:30:08 Greenwich Mean Time There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts that are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at the alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience; they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power—God, history, fate, nation, or humanity. ========== Bruce Lee : artist of life (Bruce Lee) - Highlight Loc. 3653-54 | Added on Sunday, 24 October 21 18:19:28 Greenwich Mean Time Never wasting energy on worries and negative thoughts. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7001-2 | Added on Monday, 25 October 21 07:46:15 Greenwich Mean Time He recognized that people do not always want words, or rational explanations, or demonstrations of the powers of science; they want an immediate appeal to their emotions. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7077-79 | Added on Monday, 25 October 21 08:02:30 Greenwich Mean Time Words put you on the defensive. If you have to explain yourself your power is already in question. The image, on the other hand, imposes itself as a given. It discourages questions, creates forceful associations, resists unintended interpretations, communicates instantly, and forges bonds that transcend social differences. Words stir up arguments and divisions; images bring people together. They are the quintessential instruments of power. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7133-34 | Added on Monday, 25 October 21 08:47:53 Greenwich Mean Time The people are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things.... The [prince] should, at fitting times of the year, keep the people occupied and distracted with festivities and spectacles. (Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527) ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7138-41 | Added on Monday, 25 October 21 08:48:27 Greenwich Mean Time If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them. They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior. It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7159-61 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 16:05:11 Greenwich Mean Time He had always been a bit exaggerated in his gestures. But when he flaunted his disdain for the Greeks’ simple way of life, and insulted the common Greek soldier, they began to feel he had gone too far. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7249-50 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 16:21:22 Greenwich Mean Time It is also well to avoid correcting people’s mistakes in conversation, however good your intentions may be; for it is easy to offend people, and difficult, if not impossible to mend them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7258-63 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 16:23:55 Greenwich Mean Time From an early age we learn to conceal our thoughts, telling the prickly and insecure what we know they want to hear, watching carefully lest we offend them. For most of us this is natural—there are ideas and values that most people accept, and it is pointless to argue. We believe what we want to, then, but on the outside we wear a mask. There are people, however, who see such restraints as an intolerable infringement on their freedom, and who have a need to prove the superiority of their values and beliefs. In the end, though, their arguments convince only a few and offend a great deal more. The reason arguments do not work is that most people hold their ideas and values without thinking about them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7315-16 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 16:31:08 Greenwich Mean Time The only time it is worth standing out is when you already stand out—when you have achieved an unshakable position of power, and can display your difference from others as a sign of the distance between you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7361-63 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 19:39:25 Greenwich Mean Time He did not realize that word had quickly spread of his tirade—of how the emperor had completely lost control of himself, and how Talleyrand had essentially humiliated him by maintaining his composure and dignity. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7377-78 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 19:41:10 Greenwich Mean Time To show your frustration is to show that you have lost your power to shape events; it is the helpless action of the child who resorts to a hysterical fit to get his way. The powerful never reveal this kind of weakness. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7385-87 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 19:42:48 Greenwich Mean Time Anger or hatred should never be shown otherwise than in what you do; and feelings will be all the more effective in action. in so far as you avoid the exhibition of them in any other way. It is only the cold-blooded animals whose bite is poisonous. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7423-25 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 19:50:38 Greenwich Mean Time The best way to do this is to play on uncontrollable emotions—pride, vanity, love, hate. Once the water is stirred up, the little fish cannot help but rise to the bait. The angrier they become, the less control they have, and finally they are caught in the whirlpool you have made, and they drown. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7433-36 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 19:52:32 Greenwich Mean Time Angry people usually end up looking ridiculous, for their response seems out of proportion to what occasioned it. They have taken things too seriously, exaggerating the hurt or insult that has been done to them. They are so sensitive to slight that it becomes comical how much they take personally. More comical still is their belief that their outbursts signify power. The truth is the opposite: Petulance is not power, it is a sign of helplessness. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7475-77 | Added on Tuesday, 26 October 21 20:01:37 Greenwich Mean Time If your opponent is of a hot temper, try to irritate him. If he is arrogant, try to encourage his egotism.... One who is skilled at making the enemy move does so by creating a situation according to which the enemy will act; he entices the enemy with something he is certain to take. He keeps the enemy on the move by holding out bait and then attacks him with picked troops. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7530 | Added on Thursday, 28 October 21 04:53:04 Greenwich Mean Time Powerful people judge everything by what it costs, not just in money but in time, dignity, and peace of mind. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7534-36 | Added on Thursday, 28 October 21 04:54:22 Greenwich Mean Time These types might seem to harm only themselves, but their attitudes are contagious: Unless you resist them they will infect you with the insecure feeling that you should have looked harder to find a cheaper price. Don’t argue with them or try to change them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7645-47 | Added on Thursday, 28 October 21 16:29:58 Greenwich Mean Time Never let financial details blind you to the bigger picture of how people perceive you. Their resentment will cost you in the long run. And if you want to meddle in the work of creative people under your hire, at least pay them well. Your money will buy their submission better than your displays of power. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 7858-59 | Added on Friday, 29 October 21 14:27:13 Greenwich Mean Time Whoever wants to have friends must not love his possessions but must acquire friends by means of fair gifts; for in the same way that the lodestone subtly draws iron to itself, so the gold and silver that a man gives attract the hearts of men. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 240-42 | Added on Saturday, 30 October 21 05:21:46 Greenwich Mean Time In order to be a valid immediate threat, the individual must exhibit three things and another fourth element is necessary. These are Intent, Means, Opportunity and Preclusion. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8099-8100 | Added on Saturday, 30 October 21 19:37:35 Greenwich Mean Time When our power is secure we have no need to act. This is a serious danger, especially for those who achieve success and power at an early age. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8285-87 | Added on Sunday, 31 October 21 05:55:04 Greenwich Mean Time The most effective form of isolation is somehow to separate your victims from their power base. When Mao Tse-tung wanted to eliminate an enemy in the ruling elite, he did not confront the person directly; he silently and stealthily worked to isolate the man, divide his allies and turn them away from him, shrink his support. Soon the man would vanish on his own. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8312-14 | Added on Sunday, 31 October 21 05:58:51 Greenwich Mean Time Do not waste precious time trying to steal a sheep or two; do not risk life and limb by setting upon the dogs that guard the flock. Aim at the shepherd. Lure him away and the dogs will follow. Strike him down and the flock will scatter—you can pick them off one by one. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8327-28 | Added on Sunday, 31 October 21 06:03:12 Greenwich Mean Time Keeping them close, you can secretly whittle away at their support base, so that when the time comes to cut them loose they will fall fast and hard without knowing what hit them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8330-33 | Added on Sunday, 31 October 21 06:04:46 Greenwich Mean Time Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8396-99 | Added on Sunday, 31 October 21 13:37:58 Greenwich Mean Time Pampered and indulged as children, as adults they still believe that everything must come to them; convinced of their own charm, they make no effort to charm, seduce, or gently persuade. In the realm of power, such attitudes are disastrous. At all times you must attend to those around you, gauging their particular psychology, tailoring your words to what you know will entice and seduce them. This requires energy and art. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 301-3 | Added on Sunday, 31 October 21 14:43:31 Greenwich Mean Time Making the decision is not enough. In order to prevail with a claim of self-defense you must be able to articulate (See Section 1.1.5) how these elements dictated your actions. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8619-22 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 05:34:49 Greenwich Mean Time When you have come to grips and are striving together with the enemy, and you realize that you cannot advance, you “soak in” and become one with the enemy. You can win by applying a suitable technique while you are mutually entangled. ... You can win often decisively with the advantage of knowing how to “soak” into the enemy, whereas, were you to draw apart, you would lose the chance to win. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8639-40 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 07:33:03 Greenwich Mean Time Fouché had known for years that Napoleon kept on top of those around him by spying on them day and night. The minister had survived this game by having his own spies spy on Napoleon’s spies, thus neutralizing any action Napoleon might take against him. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8693-97 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 07:43:27 Greenwich Mean Time Early in his political career, Alcibiades made a discovery that changed his whole approach to power: He had a colorful and forceful personality, but when he argued his ideas strongly with other people he would win over a few while at the same time alienating many more. The secret to gaining ascendancy over large numbers, he came to believe, was not to impose his colors but to absorb the colors of those around him, like a chameleon. Once people fell for the trick, the deceptions he went on to practice would be invisible to them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8745 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 07:51:24 Greenwich Mean Time Seduction often fails to get past the first step because it is too aggressive; the first move must always be a retreat. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8769-70 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 07:55:24 Greenwich Mean Time Over time it became clear that Simeon was a kind of king’s double. He dressed like Ivan, and acted like Ivan, but he had no real power, since no one would really obey him. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8785-86 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 08:01:20 Greenwich Mean Time The goal of power is always to lower people’s resistance to you. For this you need tricks, and one trick is to teach them a lesson. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8903-5 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 11:23:13 Greenwich Mean Time Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 8956-58 | Added on Tuesday, 2 November 21 11:32:58 Greenwich Mean Time The man who initiates strong reforms often becomes the scapegoat for any kind of dissatisfaction. And eventually the reaction to his reforms may consume him, for change is upsetting to the human animal, even when it is for the good. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9022-26 | Added on Wednesday, 3 November 21 16:02:00 Greenwich Mean Time Some two hundred years earlier, however, Emperor Ch’in had ordered the writings of Confucius burned. A few years later, word had spread that certain texts had miraculously survived, hidden under the scholar’s house. These texts may not have been genuine, but they gave Wang his opportunity: He first confiscated them, then had his scribes insert passages into them that seemed to support the changes he had been imposing on the country. When he released the texts, it seemed that Confucius sanctioned Wang’s reforms, and the people felt comforted and accepted them more easily. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9026-27 | Added on Wednesday, 3 November 21 16:02:21 Greenwich Mean Time Understand: The fact that the past is dead and buried gives you the freedom to reinterpret it. To support your cause, tinker with the facts. The past is a text in which you can safely insert your own lines. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9041-43 | Added on Wednesday, 3 November 21 16:05:44 Greenwich Mean Time “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9055-57 | Added on Wednesday, 3 November 21 16:09:20 Greenwich Mean Time He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9078-80 | Added on Wednesday, 3 November 21 16:12:27 Greenwich Mean Time Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses. Envy creates silent enemies. It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable. Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9131-32 | Added on Wednesday, 3 November 21 16:45:12 Greenwich Mean Time It takes great talent and skill to conceal one’s talent and skill ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9206-7 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 07:47:45 Greenwich Mean Time The fool dares the gods of envy by flaunting his victories. The master of power understands that the appearance of superiority over others is inconsequential next to the reality of it. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9239-42 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 07:55:07 Greenwich Mean Time The most obvious type we all know: The moment something good happens to them, whether by luck or design, they crow about it. In fact they get pleasure out of making people feel inferior. This type is obvious and beyond hope. There are others, however, who stir up envy in more subtle and unconscious ways, and are partly to blame for their troubles. Envy is often a problem, for example, for people with great natural talent. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9286 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 08:08:57 Greenwich Mean Time Power requires a wide and solid support base, which envy can silently destroy. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9286-88 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 08:09:30 Greenwich Mean Time Power requires a wide and solid support base, which envy can silently destroy. Political power of any kind creates envy, and one of the best ways to deflect it before it takes root is to seem unambitious. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9293-95 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 08:11:15 Greenwich Mean Time the wisest policy of the powerful is to create a kind of pity for themselves, as if their responsibilities were a burden and a sacrifice. How can one envy a man who has taken on a heavy load for the public interest? Disguise your power as a kind of self-sacrifice rather than a source of happiness and you make it seem less enviable. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9302-4 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 08:12:29 Greenwich Mean Time To deflect envy, Gracian recommends that the powerful display a weakness, a minor social indiscretion, a harmless vice. Give those who envy you something to feed on, distracting them from your more important sins. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9310-11 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 08:14:11 Greenwich Mean Time Do not try to help or do favors for those who envy you; they will think you are condescending to them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9512 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 09:37:51 Greenwich Mean Time When you are victorious, then, lie low, and lull the enemy into inaction. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9513-14 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 09:38:04 Greenwich Mean Time People who go past the mark are often motivated by a desire to please a master by proving their dedication. But an excess of effort exposes you to the risk of making the master suspicious of you. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9520-23 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 09:39:46 Greenwich Mean Time Another moment when a small success can spoil the chances for a larger one may come if a master or superior grants you a favor: It is a dangerous mistake to ask for more. You will seem insecure—perhaps you feel you did not deserve this favor, and have to grab as much as you can when you have the chance, which may not come again. The proper response is to accept the favor graciously and withdraw. Any subsequent favors you should earn without having to ask for them. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9677-79 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 10:58:10 Greenwich Mean Time Do not give your opponents anything solid to attack; watch as they exhaust themselves pursuing you, trying to cope with your elusiveness. Only formlessness allows you to truly surprise your enemies—by the time they figure out where you are and what you are up to, it is too late. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9679-82 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 10:58:44 Greenwich Mean Time When you want to fight us, we don’t let you and you can’t find us. But when we want to fight you, we make sure that you can’t get away and we hit you squarely ... and wipe you out.... The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9700-9703 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 11:01:50 Greenwich Mean Time When locked in the past, the powerful look comical—they are overripe fruit, waiting to fall from the tree. Power can only thrive if it is flexible in its forms. To be formless is not to be amorphous; everything has a form—it is impossible to avoid. The formlessness of power is more like that of water, or mercury, taking the form of whatever is around it. Changing constantly, it is never predictable. ========== The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene and Joost Elffers) - Highlight Loc. 9790-91 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 11:15:19 Greenwich Mean Time The need for formlessness becomes greater the older we get, as we grow more likely to become set in our ways and assume too rigid a form. We become predictable, always the first sign of decrepitude. ========== Getting Past No (William Ury) - Highlight Loc. 128-31 | Added on Thursday, 4 November 21 20:24:16 Greenwich Mean Time If we are “soft” in order to preserve the relationship, we end up giving up our position. If we are “hard” in order to win our position, we strain the relationship or perhaps lose it altogether. There is an alternative: joint problem-solving. It is neither exclusively soft nor hard, but a combination of each. It is soft on the people, hard on the problem. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1361-62 | Added on Saturday, 6 November 21 16:57:33 Greenwich Mean Time Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tempts empty posturing. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1380-82 | Added on Sunday, 7 November 21 07:46:17 Greenwich Mean Time The balance of power reduces the opportunities for using force; a shared sense of justice reduces the desire to use force. An international order which is not considered just will be challenged sooner or later. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1391-94 | Added on Sunday, 7 November 21 07:50:25 Greenwich Mean Time In Great Britain’s concept of world order, the test of the balance of power was how well the various nations could perform the roles assigned to them in the overall design—much as the United States came to regard its alliances in the period after the Second World War. In implementing this approach, Great Britain faced with respect to the Continental countries the same difference in perspective that the United States encountered during the Cold War. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1551-52 | Added on Monday, 8 November 21 13:28:18 Greenwich Mean Time Precisely because Metternich distrusted Alexander, he insisted on staying close to him and concentrated on keeping threats from his direction from ever arising. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1160 | Added on Tuesday, 9 November 21 19:25:27 Greenwich Mean Time If you are going to run or hide or bluff or fight, do it with your whole heart. Hesitation is failure. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1235-37 | Added on Tuesday, 9 November 21 19:35:43 Greenwich Mean Time The thing is that the skill to see and identify a Threat is exactly the same skill that makes walking down the sidewalk a fun adventure in people watching and geology and architecture. You live more fully, and that is even more of a benefit than the fact that predators will read you as a harder victim. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1262-65 | Added on Tuesday, 9 November 21 19:38:38 Greenwich Mean Time Eye contact is a tricky one. Direct eye contact can be required to show respect or be taken as a challenge depending on culture. Evading eye contact can be taken as deference or deception. My usual tactic when talking with someone who may be or become a Threat is to focus on the mouth. Looking at the mouth in direct conversation shows full attention without triggering a challenge. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1285-87 | Added on Tuesday, 9 November 21 19:43:38 Greenwich Mean Time Please, for your own safety, do not stand on some misguided idea of the way the world should be and deny that these places exist or that you have entered one. Denial of reality based on high-minded (but naïve) principles can carry a very high price. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1304-6 | Added on Tuesday, 9 November 21 19:46:53 Greenwich Mean Time the commanding presence and facile vocabulary that made you president of your college debating team will be triggers that can get you stabbed or beaten in a different social environment. The charm and over-the-top personality that made you prom queen can get you gang-raped. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1308-12 | Added on Tuesday, 9 November 21 19:48:00 Greenwich Mean Time I don’t give a damn about your self-esteem. The purpose of this book is to give you a few hints on staying alive or, if you teach self-defense, some critical information you can pass on to your students. The world is not about you. Everything that you know about right and wrong is context dependent. If you go to a place that is outside your context and demand that they treat you by your rules in their world, not only might you get killed, but you will be killed for being a whiny child demanding special treatment. If this is you, its time to grow up. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1483-86 | Added on Wednesday, 10 November 21 08:43:19 Greenwich Mean Time Predators use charm to gain access, but they also use it to gain information. Something as innocuous as telling the handsome stranger at the library which dorm you live in might give him everything he needs to choose an ambush site. Be wary about giving information. Be especially wary if someone asks for information that they have no need or right to know. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1492-94 | Added on Wednesday, 10 November 21 09:54:06 Greenwich Mean Time Bargaining and pleading will probably backfire, simply increasing the Threat’s sense of excitement. Predators in the wild will run toward the squealing of a distressed animal, not away. Bluffing and threatening will only work if the Threat believes you can back them up. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1839-42 | Added on Wednesday, 10 November 21 19:45:13 Greenwich Mean Time Don’t hesitate to act. Tell the person to “back off.” Make full eye contact with your hands up, but probably not fists. Use a firm, loud voice. Be rude.[20] This confrontation is a hard act for people who have trained their whole lives to be nice. Flush that. Be rude. Be loud. Be direct. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1957-59 | Added on Wednesday, 10 November 21 20:09:07 Greenwich Mean Time The kids who don’t respond, don’t scream or cry or show a response, those kids are rarely bullied. Just as babies like squeaky toys because it shows that they can influence their world, bullies like the power of causing an effect. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1960-61 | Added on Wednesday, 10 November 21 20:11:25 Greenwich Mean Time The preferred victim for bullying, then, is an emotionally expressive, physically timid person with no allies. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 1983-84 | Added on Wednesday, 10 November 21 20:13:46 Greenwich Mean Time The most important thing is to recognize that the brain you are dealing with doesn’t work like yours and you must be ready to adapt. Closely monitor what relaxes or agitates them and work with what you see. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2010-12 | Added on Thursday, 11 November 21 09:48:45 Greenwich Mean Time Use positive (do) statements, in other words, tell them what they should be doing, not what they should not be doing. For example, say, “Let’s walk on the sidewalk” instead of “Do not walk on the grass.” ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2101-3 | Added on Thursday, 11 November 21 10:00:50 Greenwich Mean Time They will maintain control of the group by killing or raping in front of all the other hostages anyone who shows resistance, leadership, or smarts. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2121-27 | Added on Thursday, 11 November 21 10:03:21 Greenwich Mean Time Do not insult. Do not challenge. Do not deny it is happening. Do leave the Threat a face-saving exit. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2513-14 | Added on Saturday, 13 November 21 05:58:26 Greenwich Mean Time here is another of the differences between amateurs and professionals in a fight. Amateurs try to make things perfect. Professionals just try to make things better. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2619-22 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:11:54 Greenwich Mean Time Posture is sending the aggressive signals: the hard stare, the verbal challenge... all the way up to the shock and awe of an artillery bombardment. Remember that you are fighting minds not bodies. Artillery bombardment or fistfight, you rarely destroy 100% of the Threat’s capability to fight. Instead, you destroy his will. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2658 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:16:25 Greenwich Mean Time wars are never won by killing people, they are won by breaking will. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2704-5 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:20:56 Greenwich Mean Time In a social violence situation a tactical freeze may allow the Threat to cool down. It is not a good strategy after damage starts. It is also not something that works if you continue to antagonize or challenge with your body language. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2731-33 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:23:15 Greenwich Mean Time The mental freezes are when decisions or thought patterns, or interruptions in thought patterns, keep you from acting. Non-cognitive freezes are deeper than the cognitive, rooted in problems with habits rather than with decisions or thinking. Lots of freezes are mental, which doesn’t mean that they are all cognitive. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2750-53 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:25:15 Greenwich Mean Time The trick they use to beat the freeze is to talk themselves through it: “What am I supposed to be doing? Ah, err, RABC! Yeah, that’s it! Are you okay? Check the airway...” Just a couple of moves into what they have trained to do, they get into the zone. The first few seconds are sloppy, then after that, they can use their skills. I found the same thing true in my first fights. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2795-97 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:32:18 Greenwich Mean Time Very similar is the desire to come up with a plan before acting. Each second spent planning is a second of damage. Damage decreases your ability to execute plans. You can easily die, doing nothing, while groping for the perfect plan. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2850-54 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:41:02 Greenwich Mean Time Some people are trained to freeze, conditioned to be victims. It probably started as or was intended to be submission but the programming has gone far deeper. This trained helplessness is a survival strategy for long-term abuse where the abuser chooses to see any sign of independence or spirit as an affront to his social status. I have seen the effects of this training but there are people far more qualified to write about the process and implications than I am. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2863-69 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:42:10 Greenwich Mean Time In order to break the freeze, you must recognize that you are frozen. If you believe or know you should be doing something and you aren’t, you are frozen. If you are taking damage or seeing someone else take damage and you have a warm, comfortable feeling and hear a rushing noise in your ears like the ocean, you are frozen. Recognize it. Acknowledge it. Say, “I’m frozen.” Out-loud is better because it reminds you that you can affect the world. It is easy to say stuff in your head and not do it. Then tell yourself to do something—scream, hit back, run—and do it. Then, again, tell yourself to do something, maybe even repeat the same action and do it. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2885-86 | Added on Sunday, 14 November 21 19:43:22 Greenwich Mean Time Develop the habit of doing unpleasant things quickly and without hesitation. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 2954-55 | Added on Monday, 15 November 21 03:53:07 Greenwich Mean Time Probably the most damaging mental habits you will bring from the normal world are the desire to gather too much information and the perceived need to make a plan. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3024-27 | Added on Monday, 15 November 21 04:15:31 Greenwich Mean Time You get clumsy is the big one. The strength of your chemical dump will determine how clumsy. Even under a relatively mild dump (and those are rare, unless you have been ambushed a lot and kind of expected this one) your fine motor skills degrade. Fine motor skills are those things that you can’t do well when your hands are shaking, like writing, smoothly pressing a trigger, or putting a finger or blade exactly where you want it on a moving target. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3184-85 | Added on Tuesday, 16 November 21 19:12:33 Greenwich Mean Time The more variables in a situation the more luck plays a role in deciding the outcome, and luck is the enemy of a contest of skill. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3194-95 | Added on Tuesday, 16 November 21 19:14:35 Greenwich Mean Time Training to use the environment, is one of those things that is infinitely complex. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3284-86 | Added on Tuesday, 16 November 21 19:23:39 Greenwich Mean Time This is one of those things that I suspect can make your life deeper and richer, but I have trained myself to look for gifts in dangerous times. The opportunities are there always and in all ways, in friendship and romance, in opportunity and new ideas. Every second the universe offers you gifts to make life better, if you learn to see them and accept them. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3324-26 | Added on Tuesday, 16 November 21 19:30:33 Greenwich Mean Time Check to make sure that your ego isn’t involved, if you are winning why haven’t you left and moved to safety? Are you fighting the urge to transition from self-defense to an Educational Beat Down? ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3482-85 | Added on Wednesday, 17 November 21 18:53:14 Greenwich Mean Time “... we see that the aim in maneuver warfare is to render the enemy incapable of resisting by shattering his moral and physical cohesion... rather than to destroy him physically...” The manual advocates the ability to move and change in space and time in order to create a situation the enemy cannot cope with. Not one the enemy can’t win. Not to destroy the enemy, but to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to cope. Coping is a mental skill. Beating the mind, not the army. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3732-34 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 04:41:01 Greenwich Mean Time Testing is a medical procedure and it is against the law to force anyone to take a blood test without consent... but many officers are very good at talking arrestees into agreeing to a simple blood test. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3739-40 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 04:42:11 Greenwich Mean Time For the next twenty-four hours (at least) after a fight, drink lots of water. Water helps to metabolize the stress hormones that built up in your system. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3792-97 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 04:47:56 Greenwich Mean Time Most are good at reading a scene quickly, but most are experienced enough to know how effective a predator assault can be. If you are the last man standing, a betting man would say that you started it. You start the encounter with the police as the winner presumed to be guilty. That said, should you even be there? Should you leave before the police arrive? Ideally, you should leave as soon as it is safe to do so because you are going to safety. You do not leave to avoid legal entanglements. That’s what criminals do. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3806-9 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 04:49:26 Greenwich Mean Time This matters because cops are not used to dealing with innocent people. Criminals lie and manipulate, often by acting innocent. They may act innocent more convincingly than you can be innocent. Anything you feel like saying or doing as an innocent man will look exactly like the last ten criminals the officer handled who were only trying to act innocent. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3938-41 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 05:10:24 Greenwich Mean Time Never be afraid to talk about your fear on the stand. Fear is the primal justification for defending yourself. Most of the jury may never have defended themselves, may know nothing about fighting that they didn’t learn from TV. But they will all understand fear. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 3959-63 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 05:13:13 Greenwich Mean Time Sometimes all you get is the letter, usually demanding an astronomical sum, and a note to call. If you call, the attorney at the other end of the line will say, “We can make this go away for...” he will then name a much lower sum. If a criminal did this it would be called a shakedown, pure and simple. Put you in fear of losing your home, savings, and retirement account and then offer a much cheaper way out. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 4015-19 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 07:48:27 Greenwich Mean Time The standard of proof in criminal proceedings is “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Ideally, there is no explanation left (excepting magic, aliens, or psychic powers) other than the defendant did it. In civil court, the jury must merely find it “more likely than not,” 51% in other words, that the defendant is responsible. This is a side-effect of the “citizen versus citizen level playing field” idea. This makes it critical for you to have an aggressive defense and actively prove that the Threat was culpable. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 4048-49 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 07:52:46 Greenwich Mean Time Stories require drama and drama requires conflict. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 4109-10 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 08:06:20 Greenwich Mean Time there is one piece of advice I can give a survivor it is this: when given a choice between agonizing on the past and living, live. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 4133-35 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 08:10:37 Greenwich Mean Time Living in the moment and for the future is almost always healthier than dwelling in the past, agonizing over the “why.” The universe does not give a damn about “why.” The universe has no need or desire to make sense, certainly not for the benefit of one little human. The entire “why” question is a pathetic little attempt to regain some control ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 4285-86 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 12:22:43 Greenwich Mean Time The atavistic power to take what you want, to force your will on others and to kill is a fact of nature. ========== Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected (Rory Miller and Barry Eisler) - Highlight Loc. 4370-76 | Added on Thursday, 18 November 21 12:34:07 Greenwich Mean Time The third and rarest type of traumatic change comes from long-term exposure as a continuous victim. As a slave or captive or a continuously abused child (such as Jaycee Dugard, held for eighteen years in California; or Colleen Stan, the subject of the book, Perfect Victim) the survivor has a suite of different factors. The trauma and victimization, of course. There is also the possibility of a complete lack of connection with the normal world. The survivor of a single event is still primarily connected with the normal world. The professional bounces regularly on both side of the looking glass. Someone who has been a captive for extended time may effectively forget that there is a normal world and forget how it works. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1605-8 | Added on Saturday, 20 November 21 18:41:31 Greenwich Mean Time Castlereagh, it was said by one of Austria’s diplomats, was “like a great lover of music who is at Church; he wishes to applaud but he dare not.”20 But if even the most European-minded of British statesmen dared not applaud what he believed in, Great Britain’s role in the Concert of Europe was destined to be transitory and ineffective. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1673-74 | Added on Saturday, 20 November 21 18:57:21 Greenwich Mean Time Nicholas I was enraged that Napoleon, whom he considered an illegitimate upstart, should presume to step into Russia’s shoes as protector of Balkan Slavs, and demanded equal status with France. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 1738-39 | Added on Saturday, 20 November 21 19:09:34 Greenwich Mean Time “We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies,” said Palmerston. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2056-57 | Added on Sunday, 21 November 21 19:05:10 Greenwich Mean Time Actions geared to the mood of the moment and unrelated to any overall strategy cannot be sustained indefinitely. ========== The Meaning of It All (Richard Phillips Feynman) - Highlight Loc. 539-40 | Added on Tuesday, 23 November 21 18:43:47 Greenwich Mean Time One of the best examples is Lysenko, who has a theory of genetics, which is that acquired characteristics can be passed on to the offspring. ========== The Meaning of It All (Richard Phillips Feynman) - Highlight Loc. 836-38 | Added on Friday, 26 November 21 18:17:34 Greenwich Mean Time So, in short, you can’t prove anything by one occurrence, or two occurrences, and so on. Everything has to be checked out very carefully. Otherwise you become one of these people who believe all kinds of crazy stuff and doesn’t understand the world they’re in. Nobody understands the world they’re in, but some people are better off at it than others. ========== The Meaning of It All (Richard Phillips Feynman) - Highlight Loc. 1083-86 | Added on Saturday, 27 November 21 18:23:36 Greenwich Mean Time I would like to point out that people are not honest. Scientists are not honest at all, either. It’s useless. Nobody’s honest. Scientists are not honest. And people usually believe that they are. That makes it worse. By honest I don’t mean that you only tell what’s true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind. ========== The Meaning of It All (Richard Phillips Feynman) - Highlight Loc. 1236-40 | Added on Saturday, 27 November 21 19:00:30 Greenwich Mean Time Now in the days of Galileo there were great arguments about what makes a body fall, all kinds of arguments about the medium and the pushes and the pulls and so on. And what Galileo did was disregard all the arguments and decide if it fell and how fast it fell, and just describe that. On that everybody could agree. And keep on studying in that direction, on what everyone can agree, and never mind the machinery and the theory underneath, as long as possible. And then gradually, with the accumulation of experience, you find other theories underneath that are more satisfactory, perhaps. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2208-9 | Added on Sunday, 28 November 21 05:22:05 Greenwich Mean Time Napoleon’s problem was that he was not strong enough to insist, and that his schemes were too radical to command consensus. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2341-42 | Added on Sunday, 28 November 21 08:39:11 Greenwich Mean Time The bargaining position of a country depends on the options it is perceived to have. Closing them off eases the adversary’s calculations, and constricts those of the practitioners of Realpolitik. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2549-51 | Added on Monday, 29 November 21 09:36:56 Greenwich Mean Time Napoleon had revolutionary ideas but recoiled before their implications. Having spent his youth in what the twentieth century would call protest, he never bridged the gap between the formulation of an idea and its implementation. Insecure about his purposes and indeed his legitimacy, he relied on public opinion to bridge that gap. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2556-58 | Added on Monday, 29 November 21 09:37:52 Greenwich Mean Time The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2566-67 | Added on Monday, 29 November 21 09:39:27 Greenwich Mean Time Napoleon’s tragedy was that his ambitions surpassed his capacities; Bismarck’s tragedy was that his capacities exceeded his society’s ability to absorb them. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 2607 | Added on Monday, 29 November 21 11:40:45 Greenwich Mean Time And the disintegration of the Austrian Empire would leave Germany without a single dependable ally. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 3192-93 | Added on Wednesday, 1 December 21 04:36:05 Greenwich Mean Time after Bismarck’s departure, moderation was the quality Germany lacked the most. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 3210-12 | Added on Wednesday, 1 December 21 04:40:17 Greenwich Mean Time German leaders after Bismarck combined truculence with indecisiveness, hurling their country, first into isolation and then into war. Bismarck had taken great pains to downplay assertions of German power, using his intricate system of alliances to restrain his many partners and to keep their latent incompatibilities from erupting into war. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 3234-36 | Added on Wednesday, 1 December 21 04:49:25 Greenwich Mean Time At various times, Great Britain had been looking for allies against Russia, trying Germany before settling on Japan. No one would have thought that Great Britain, France, and Russia could possibly end up on the same side. Yet, ten years later, that was exactly what came to pass under the impact of insistent and threatening German diplomacy. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 3677 | Added on Friday, 3 December 21 05:26:50 Greenwich Mean Time According to Crowe, Germany’s unconstrained conduct guaranteed confrontation: ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 3774-75 | Added on Friday, 3 December 21 18:38:36 Greenwich Mean Time Germany backed down, accepting a large but worthless tract of land in Central Africa, a transaction which elicited a groan from Germany’s nationalistic press. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 4140-41 | Added on Monday, 6 December 21 08:20:52 Greenwich Mean Time On July 30, Nicholas ordered full mobilization. On July 31, Germany once more demanded an end to Russian mobilization. When that request was ignored, Germany declared war on Russia. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 4419-20 | Added on Tuesday, 7 December 21 18:45:47 Greenwich Mean Time Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office, compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 4687-90 | Added on Friday, 10 December 21 05:18:09 Greenwich Mean Time To contain Germany, France needed an ally in the East that could force Germany to fight a two-front war. Russia was the only country strong enough to fulfill that role. But with Poland separating Germany and Russia, Russia could only pressure Germany by violating Poland. And Poland was too weak to play Russia’s role. What the Treaty of Versailles did was to give an incentive to Germany and Russia to partition Poland, precisely what they did twenty years later. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 4966-67 | Added on Saturday, 11 December 21 17:48:01 Greenwich Mean Time the bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later—a lesson America had to learn with respect to Iraq at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 5347-49 | Added on Saturday, 18 December 21 19:39:46 Greenwich Mean Time As one quip had it, Austen “always played the game, and always lost it.” Harold Macmillan said of Austen Chamberlain: “He spoke well, but never in the grand style. He was clear, but not incisive…. He was respected, but never feared.”13 ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 5587-89 | Added on Sunday, 19 December 21 19:26:06 Greenwich Mean Time he would for the rest of his life insist that Germany could be defeated only by itself, not by foreigners. This line of thinking transmuted the defeat of 1918 into treason, while the failure on the part of Germany’s leaders to fight to the end became a staple of Hitler’s obsessive rhetoric and mind-numbing monologues. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 5694-95 | Added on Sunday, 19 December 21 19:55:58 Greenwich Mean Time Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 5880-81 | Added on Monday, 20 December 21 08:58:04 Greenwich Mean Time Popular literature and films often depict the opposite—policymakers as the helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments more often follow than guide policy decisions. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 6182-83 | Added on Wednesday, 22 December 21 19:28:00 Greenwich Mean Time But common geopolitical interest is a powerful bond, and it was pushing the old enemies, Hitler and Stalin, inexorably together. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 6216-17 | Added on Friday, 24 December 21 04:55:27 Greenwich Mean Time One principle in Stalin’s universe of inhuman and cold-blooded calculation was, however, immutable: nothing could justify fighting hopeless battles for dubious causes. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 6453-55 | Added on Sunday, 26 December 21 18:53:19 Greenwich Mean Time Showing eagerness rarely speeds up negotiations. No experienced statesman settles just because his interlocutor feels a sense of urgency; he is far more likely to use such impatience to try to extract even better terms. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 6495-97 | Added on Sunday, 26 December 21 19:04:28 Greenwich Mean Time The historian A. J. P. Taylor has shown that, in the exchanges between Great Britain and the Soviet Union, the Soviets, rather uncharacteristically, responded to British proposals much more quickly than the British did to Soviet messages. From this fact Taylor concluded, in my view incorrectly, that the Kremlin was more anxious for an alliance than London was.20 ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 6703-6 | Added on Wednesday, 29 December 21 18:24:04 Greenwich Mean Time Hitler usually confined himself to passionate statements of general principle. On the few occasions he did participate in actual negotiations—as with the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg or Neville Chamberlain—he adopted a bullying manner and put forward peremptory demands which he rarely modified. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 6863-66 | Added on Wednesday, 29 December 21 18:56:18 Greenwich Mean Time Stalin’s principal weakness as a statesman was his tendency to ascribe to his adversaries the same capacity for cold calculation of which he was so proud in himself. This caused Stalin to underestimate the impact of his own intransigence and to overestimate the scope available in his, however rare, efforts at conciliation. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 7117-19 | Added on Friday, 31 December 21 18:48:31 Greenwich Mean Time Roosevelt was careful not to spell out what he meant by “quarantine” and what, if any, specific measures he might have in mind. Had the speech implied any kind of action, it would have been inconsistent with the Neutrality Acts, which the Congress had overwhelmingly approved and the President had recently signed. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 7174-77 | Added on Sunday, 2 January 22 12:07:38 Greenwich Mean Time A leader who confines himself to the experience of his people in a period of upheaval purchases temporary popularity at the price of condemnation by posterity, whose claims he is neglecting. A leader who gets too far ahead of his society will become irrelevant. A great leader must be an educator, bridging the gap between his visions and the familiar. But he must also be willing to walk alone to enable his society to follow the path he has selected. ========== Getting Past No (William Ury) - Highlight Loc. 224-25 | Added on Monday, 3 January 22 19:02:06 Greenwich Mean Time Show them that they cannot win by themselves but only together with you. The fifth step is to Use Power to Educate. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 7695 | Added on Tuesday, 4 January 22 19:35:38 Greenwich Mean Time Nothing is more futile than historical might-have-beens; ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 8062-64 | Added on Monday, 21 February 22 05:05:30 Greenwich Mean Time “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them think anything of their pledged word.” ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 8099-8100 | Added on Monday, 21 February 22 05:18:10 Greenwich Mean Time In Stalin’s view, face-to-face encounters between world leaders might register a correlation of forces or a calculation of the national interest, but they could not alter it. He therefore never responded to any of Roosevelt’s or Churchill’s appeals to return to their wartime camaraderie. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 8659-61 | Added on Wednesday, 23 February 22 18:24:39 Greenwich Mean Time The way to defeat Soviet strategy was by “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 8736-38 | Added on Wednesday, 23 February 22 18:44:44 Greenwich Mean Time The State Department analysis concluded that the North Atlantic Treaty “is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting ‘balance of power’ but to strengthen the ‘balance of principle.’ ” ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 9016-19 | Added on Thursday, 24 February 22 09:51:42 Greenwich Mean Time The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the peoples America had set out to defend—on the whole successfully—but the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 9242-45 | Added on Friday, 25 February 22 08:11:27 Greenwich Mean Time MacArthur did not consider stalemate a meaningful objective. He argued strenuously and eloquently that the danger of escalation had been inherent in the initial decision to intervene, and that it could not be mitigated by restraint in the conduct of military operations. If anything, they would increase these risks by prolonging the war. In testifying in 1951, MacArthur insisted: “You have got a war on your hands, and you can’t just say, ‘Let that war go on indefinitely while I prepare for some other war….’ ” ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 9343-45 | Added on Friday, 25 February 22 08:51:33 Greenwich Mean Time diplomats rarely pay for services already rendered—especially in wartime. Typically, it is pressure on the battlefield that generates the negotiation. Relieving that pressure reduces the enemy’s incentive to negotiate seriously, and it tempts him to drag out the negotiations in order to determine whether other unilateral gestures might be forthcoming. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 9644-46 | Added on Saturday, 26 February 22 17:30:31 Greenwich Mean Time Stalin’s successors felt a need for a respite from tensions with the West even more desperately than their former leader. However, they lacked his authority, his subtlety, his perseverance, and, most important, the political unity required to pursue so complicated a course. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 11226-27 | Added on Thursday, 31 March 22 09:31:48 Greenwich Mean Time On another occasion, Khrushchev told the British Ambassador that it would take only six atomic bombs to destroy England and nine to obliterate France.34 ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 11722-26 | Added on Tuesday, 5 April 22 18:19:06 Greenwich Mean Time The Nuclear Age turned strategy into deterrence, and deterrence into an esoteric intellectual exercise. Since deterrence can only be tested negatively, by events that do not take place, and since it is never possible to demonstrate why something has not occurred, it became especially difficult to assess whether the existing policy was the best possible policy or a just barely effective one. Perhaps deterrence was even unnecessary because it was impossible to prove whether the adversary ever intended to attack in the first place. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 12941-43 | Added on Wednesday, 20 April 22 04:12:51 Greenwich Mean Time “[W]e refuse to be anti-Communist,” said two pilgrims to Hanoi, Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden. “We insist that the term has lost all specific content it once had. Instead it serves as the key category of abstract thought which Americans use to justify a foreign policy that is often no more sophisticated than rape.” ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 13446-48 | Added on Thursday, 21 April 22 04:55:47 Greenwich Mean Time The test of a society is whether it can submerge its differences in the pursuit of common objectives, and whether it can keep in mind that societies thrive on their reconciliations, not on their conflicts. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 13630-32 | Added on Friday, 22 April 22 03:14:19 Greenwich Mean Time Nixon was not a student of history in the same way that Churchill or de Gaulle had been. He generally learned just enough about a country’s past to absorb the rudiments of the facts pertaining to its circumstances—and often not even that much. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 13638-39 | Added on Friday, 22 April 22 03:16:50 Greenwich Mean Time In Nixon’s perception, peace and harmony were not the natural order of things but temporary oases in a perilous world where stability could only be preserved by vigilant effort. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 13645-49 | Added on Friday, 22 April 22 03:19:41 Greenwich Mean Time We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 13744 | Added on Friday, 22 April 22 03:46:04 Greenwich Mean Time it asserted that opposition to communism actually strengthened communism. ========== India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present (Shivshankar Menon) - Highlight Loc. 762-64 | Added on Saturday, 23 April 22 17:02:29 Greenwich Mean Time Pakistan. 3 In 1947 India acquired 81 percent of the British India’s population but only 72 percent of the area, and that needed to be unified and integrated. ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 82-85 | Added on Wednesday, 27 April 22 07:08:23 Greenwich Mean Time (Although the hymn is basically addressed to Vayu, Indra, Mitra and Varuna also figure in it. Indra is the chief god of the Vedas. He rules over the atmosphere (antariksha), the intervening region between the earth (prithivi) and heaven (dyuloka). Indra kills the demons with his weapon vajra. ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 185-86 | Added on Wednesday, 27 April 22 07:32:48 Greenwich Mean Time (The thirty-three gods included eight Vasus, eleven Rudras and twelve Adityas. This adds up to thirty-one. The remaining two are sometimes identified as Prajapati and Vashatkar.) ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 254-56 | Added on Wednesday, 27 April 22 07:59:42 Greenwich Mean Time The paramatman and the atman are intimately connected with each other. The atman savours the fruit of the world, that is, the rewards of actions. But the paramatman does not savour these fruit. It remains a detached and passive spectator.) ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 337-39 | Added on Thursday, 28 April 22 08:01:47 Greenwich Mean Time The Rudra of the Vedas seems to have been a god of storms. It was only later that he came to be identified with Shiva. Rudra is the father of the Maruts, who were gods of the wind. ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 632-34 | Added on Saturday, 30 April 22 19:04:38 Greenwich Mean Time Cows never perish. Even thieves bear them no hatred. The weapons of the enemies do not pierce cows. Me who possesses cows uses their milk to make offerings to the gods. ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 663-64 | Added on Saturday, 30 April 22 19:11:08 Greenwich Mean Time (Every man owes a debt to his ancestors. That debt is repaid only when he gives birth to a son. Once Divodasa was born, his father's ancestral debt was cancelled.) ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 755-57 | Added on Sunday, 1 May 22 05:26:40 Greenwich Mean Time Those who want to kill us may be close to us, or they may be far away. They may be our inferiors. But whatever be their nature, may all the gods destroy them. I will be protected as I am armed with the armour of knowledge. ========== Rig Veda (Great Epics of India: Vedas Book 1) (Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy) - Highlight Loc. 785-87 | Added on Sunday, 1 May 22 05:35:32 Greenwich Mean Time O sons of Vasishtha! May your glory spread before the rays of the sun. May your fame be deep as the ocean itself. May your hymns reach the gods as swiftly as Vayu. May no one else be able to duplicate the hymns that you chant. It is only you who possess that special knowledge. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 16114-15 | Added on Monday, 16 May 22 18:19:11 Greenwich Mean Time It is also an ambiguity with which the United States is not totally comfortable, since it runs counter to the American tendency to label nations neatly as either friend or foe. ========== Diplomacy (Henry Kissinger) - Highlight Loc. 16256-57 | Added on Monday, 16 May 22 19:08:23 Greenwich Mean Time “Traveler,” says a Spanish proverb, “there are no roads. Roads are made by walking.” ========== MODI@20: Dreams Meet Delivery (Sudha Murty, Sadhguru, Nandan Nilekani, Amish Tripathi, Amit Shah, Arvind Panagariya, S. Jaishankar, Lata Mangeshkar, Ajit Doval K.C., P.V. Sindhu, Shobana Kamineni, Surjit S. Bhalla, Pradeep Gupta, Anantha Nageswaran, Shamika Ravi, Uday S. Kotak, Ajay Mathur, Anupam Kher, Ashok Gulati, Dr Devi Shetty, Nripendra Misra, Manoj Ladwa, Bharat Barai and BlueKraft Digital Foundation) - Bookmark Loc. 369 | Added on Wednesday, 18 May 22 10:13:22 Greenwich Mean Time ========== MODI@20: Dreams Meet Delivery (Sudha Murty, Sadhguru, Nandan Nilekani, Amish Tripathi, Amit Shah, Arvind Panagariya, S. Jaishankar, Lata Mangeshkar, Ajit Doval K.C., P.V. Sindhu, Shobana Kamineni, Surjit S. Bhalla, Pradeep Gupta, Anantha Nageswaran, Shamika Ravi, Uday S. Kotak, Ajay Mathur, Anupam Kher, Ashok Gulati, Dr Devi Shetty, Nripendra Misra, Manoj Ladwa, Bharat Barai and BlueKraft Digital Foundation) - Highlight Loc. 1056-58 | Added on Tuesday, 24 May 22 17:57:28 Greenwich Mean Time Change must be evolutionary in a civilizational state like India. It must be gradual. It must take current realities into account. And, it cannot be nihilistic. It must build on what already exists. It must be adaptable. ========== MODI@20: Dreams Meet Delivery (Sudha Murty, Sadhguru, Nandan Nilekani, Amish Tripathi, Amit Shah, Arvind Panagariya, S. Jaishankar, Lata Mangeshkar, Ajit Doval K.C., P.V. Sindhu, Shobana Kamineni, Surjit S. Bhalla, Pradeep Gupta, Anantha Nageswaran, Shamika Ravi, Uday S. Kotak, Ajay Mathur, Anupam Kher, Ashok Gulati, Dr Devi Shetty, Nripendra Misra, Manoj Ladwa, Bharat Barai and BlueKraft Digital Foundation) - Highlight Loc. 1740-41 | Added on Monday, 6 June 22 18:35:07 Greenwich Mean Time Human psychology is driven by needs, expectations and aspirations, which in turn are the reasons behind one’s choices and decisions. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 81 | Added on Saturday, 18 June 22 18:09:25 Greenwich Mean Time rather than allow events to come upon us, these are better anticipated and analysed. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 82-83 | Added on Saturday, 18 June 22 18:10:25 Greenwich Mean Time This default option of playing defence reflects a mindset that does not comprehend external events well, leave alone appreciate their implications. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 148-49 | Added on Thursday, 14 July 22 07:36:21 Greenwich Mean Time Clearly, in a more nationalistic world, diplomacy will use competition to extract as much gains from as many ties as possible. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 231-32 | Added on Thursday, 14 July 22 18:01:56 Greenwich Mean Time It is one of constant advancement of goals and interests, using all pathways that the world has to offer. And since that often means plunging into the unknown, it requires both judgement and courage. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 285-87 | Added on Thursday, 14 July 22 18:20:29 Greenwich Mean Time international relations is an exercise of both forging convergences and managing divergences. Such dynamic processes will keep evolving while coexisting. At the extremes, they produce allies or create conflicts. But in an inter-dependent world, most relationships tend to settle down in the middle. Convergences even among competing powers is not unknown. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 368-69 | Added on Sunday, 17 July 22 18:41:57 Greenwich Mean Time Single-minded pursuit of national interest will make our world look like a bazaar, with more players, less rules and greater volatility. As a result, goals are more immediate and approaches more tactical. ========== The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien) - Highlight Loc. 969 | Added on Sunday, 24 July 22 17:54:30 Greenwich Mean Time he always called himself 'my precious.' ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 429-31 | Added on Sunday, 7 August 22 18:46:36 Greenwich Mean Time The emerging world is also likely to fall back on balance of power as its operating principle, rather than collective security or a broader consensus. History has demonstrated that this approach usually produces unstable equilibriums. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 578-79 | Added on Tuesday, 9 August 22 11:35:56 Greenwich Mean Time the end goal even, perhaps especially, in a volatile world is clear. Many friends, few foes, great goodwill, more influence. That must be achieved through the India Way. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 634-36 | Added on Tuesday, 9 August 22 11:48:01 Greenwich Mean Time Also relevant in this context is summoning the willpower to address concerns that are upon us, rather than rationalize inaction by highlighting its costs. We have heard, all too often, arguments that a competitor is too big to challenge and would anyway prevail in the end. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 673 | Added on Tuesday, 9 August 22 11:58:50 Greenwich Mean Time Today, India not only needs to pay attention to the quality of cards that it has but also focus on how to play them well. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 698-700 | Added on Thursday, 11 August 22 19:23:35 Greenwich Mean Time The strength of an unorthodox player is to make an accurate judgement about the likely responses of the more orthodox and rule-bound one. While themselves indulging in unrestrained actions, their tactics would be to hold the other side to higher standards. Arbitraging that gap, of course, gives them a great edge. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 776-78 | Added on Thursday, 11 August 22 20:11:11 Greenwich Mean Time Rukmi of Vidharba is the other notable warrior who stays out of the war, but for a very different reason. He overestimates his value to both sides and ends up accepted by neither. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 869-71 | Added on Friday, 12 August 22 16:24:19 Greenwich Mean Time ‘History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon’ – NAPOLEON BONAPARTE ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 893-97 | Added on Friday, 12 August 22 18:20:56 Greenwich Mean Time the first caution is to avoid obsessing about consistency, because it makes little sense in such changing circumstances. There is certainly a place for constants, but not to the extent of elevating them to immutable concepts. On the contrary, it is only by recognizing change that we are in a position to exploit opportunities. The purposeful pursuit of national interest in shifting global dynamics may not be easy; but it must be done. Prejudices and preconceptions cannot be allowed to stand in the way. And the real obstacle to the rise of India is not any more the barriers of the world, but the dogmas of Delhi. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1010-12 | Added on Friday, 12 August 22 19:12:38 Greenwich Mean Time We tend to assume that the events in the period leading up to 1962 were predestined. In fact, the narrative of a ‘betrayal’ was designed to mitigate responsibility for a policy disaster at the highest levels. It took such deep root that the subsequent demonization of China has stood in the way of an objective analysis of India-China relations in this period. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1018-20 | Added on Friday, 12 August 22 19:15:55 Greenwich Mean Time More than the issue itself, what comes out is a tendency to postpone a difficult issue. Avoiding hard choices was true in respect of the nuclear option as well. The same mindset led to the limited involvement of the military leadership in decision-making during the 1962 conflict. Instead, at the first sign of setback, we turned to others for both advice and assistance. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1263-64 | Added on Sunday, 14 August 22 13:08:12 Greenwich Mean Time This is a game best played on the front foot, appreciating that progress on any one front strengthens that on all others. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1335-37 | Added on Sunday, 14 August 22 13:51:47 Greenwich Mean Time A nation that has the aspiration to become a leading power some day cannot continue with unsettled borders, an unintegrated region and under-exploited opportunities. Above all, it cannot be dogmatic in approaching a changing global order. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1378 | Added on Monday, 15 August 22 15:01:02 Greenwich Mean Time Multinational empires struggled with nationalist sentiment and by and large, lost out. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1379-80 | Added on Monday, 15 August 22 15:02:49 Greenwich Mean Time Western imperialism was eventually undone by nationalist sentiments awakening in their former colonies. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1413-15 | Added on Monday, 15 August 22 17:33:02 Greenwich Mean Time In emotional terms, nationalism obviously contributes to a stronger sense of unity. In political terms, it signifies a greater determination to combat both sub-national and supra-national challenges to it. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1430-31 | Added on Monday, 15 August 22 17:39:46 Greenwich Mean Time it is also important that where there are real problems, we do not duck them. Generosity and firmness must go hand in hand. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1451-52 | Added on Monday, 15 August 22 17:50:35 Greenwich Mean Time A 2018 study estimated that the resources drained from India by the UK alone were as much as $ 45 trillion by current value. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1503-5 | Added on Monday, 15 August 22 18:55:21 Greenwich Mean Time Old habits explain why the countries that contribute troops to UN peacekeeping have little say in the mandates. Or that the bombing of an Air India aircraft off Ireland is treated so differently from that of PanAm over Lockerbie four years later. We have seen societies that overlook advocacy of terrorism in the name of free speech then practise rendition when their own security is at stake. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1624-25 | Added on Tuesday, 16 August 22 06:48:13 Greenwich Mean Time ‘The wise win before the fight, while the ignorant fight to win’ – ZHUGE LIANG ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1659-60 | Added on Tuesday, 16 August 22 17:59:08 Greenwich Mean Time It was telling that Chairman Mao himself reminded the Indian Ambassador in 1950 of a popular saying that Chinese who do good in this lifetime would get reincarnated in India in the next. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 1896-97 | Added on Wednesday, 17 August 22 06:32:50 Greenwich Mean Time Some of the historical accounts of negotiations bring out how China used inexactitude to give itself more wiggle room. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 2103-8 | Added on Friday, 19 August 22 12:45:17 Greenwich Mean Time At that time, Japan not only bought the Western narrative on non-proliferation but also the hyphenation of India-Pakistan and the accompanying analysis of Jammu and Kashmir. Consequently, Japan ended up as the prime mover of measures against India, including the UN Security Council Resolution 1172. It is important to reflect on this period because there are pointers for the future direction of ties. When India and Japan have dealt directly with each other rather than through Western mediation, their instincts have been positive. Japan must surely note how pragmatic Western countries and China eventually were in the aftermath of 1998. Therefore, developing a sharper sense of geopolitics can certainly contribute to building ties with India. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 2212-13 | Added on Friday, 19 August 22 13:28:47 Greenwich Mean Time Because Donald Trump used this term in the 2017 APEC Summit and the US Pacific Command was renamed as the Indo-Pacific one, Americans think that they invented it. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 2372-77 | Added on Friday, 19 August 22 17:29:11 Greenwich Mean Time The centrality of the Indian Ocean to global trade and development is not a fresh realization. After all, it covers one-fifth of the world’s total ocean area and encapsulates coastlines of almost 70,000 km. But more than the expanse, it is about location. With Asia’s economic revival, whether we see the region as markets or production centres, transportation of goods has only acquired greater salience. The flow of natural resources is correspondingly growing with this ocean now accounting for two-thirds of the world’s maritime oil trade. More than two-fifths of the world’s population lives around the ocean. Ensuring the smooth and uninterrupted flow of one-third of the world’s bulk cargo and half its container traffic is not a small responsibility. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 2396-98 | Added on Friday, 19 August 22 17:40:09 Greenwich Mean Time In this uncertain world, if there is a point of agreement, it is that the salience of alliances is decreasing. It is equally apparent that old-fashioned military rivalries are giving way to more subtle competitions for influence. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 2398-2400 | Added on Friday, 19 August 22 17:40:53 Greenwich Mean Time The future is to get nations whose interests are aligned or even overlap to work together. That would mean agendas and conversations with a more open mind. And an appreciation for what each player can bring to the table. This trend is visible already in naval exercises, strategic consultations or infrastructure projects. ========== The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World (S. Jaishankar) - Highlight Loc. 2784-85 | Added on Friday, 19 August 22 19:26:40 Greenwich Mean Time For India, this means optimal relationships with all the major powers to best advance its goals. It also requires a bolder and nonreciprocal approach to the immediate and extended neighbourhood. ========== An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (Richard Dawkins) - Highlight Loc. 276-77 | Added on Sunday, 9 October 22 01:36:10 Greenwich Mean Time When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. ========== Overdraft (Urijit Patel) - Highlight Loc. 175-76 | Added on Wednesday, 26 October 22 22:04:14 Greenwich Mean Time Banking is a business almost wholly conducted with other people’s money, mostly those who place their savings as deposits; pure equity of those who own a bank can be even lower than 5.5 per cent of risk-weighted assets. ========== Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis (James Rickards) - Highlight Loc. 208-9 | Added on Monday, 12 December 22 19:02:59 Greenwich Mean Time With these fronts in place, sovereign wealth funds could then be used to exercise malign influence over target companies in order to steal technology, sabotage new projects, stifle competition, engage in bid rigging, recruit agents or manipulate markets. ==========