More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘What happens to a country when a donkey makes the decisions that people are supposed to make you can read every day in the paper.’
Part of the job of being an Israeli Jew was to at least pretend to forget the unforgettable.
He’d been asked to divine the character of the nation’s youth. Instead he’d found out something about people who try to divine other people’s character: Remove their gut feelings, and their judgments improved. He’d been handed a narrow problem and discovered a broad truth.
He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.” He’d heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.” Once, after Amos gave a talk, an English statistician had approached him. “I don’t usually like Jews but I like you,” the
...more
“Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”
“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”
People said some strange things. For instance, they said that magenta was similar to red, but that red wasn’t similar to magenta. Amos spotted the contradiction and set out to generalize it. He asked people if they thought North Korea was like Red China. They said yes. He asked them if Red China was like North Korea—and they said no. People thought Tel Aviv was like New York but that New York was not like Tel Aviv. People thought that the number 103 was sort of like the number 100, but that 100 wasn’t like 103. People thought a toy train was a lot like a real train but that a real train was
...more
By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.
“You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.”
As Chris Marker said:
“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.
Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away,
You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
he found it further troubling to think that “crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority.”
“the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery,” depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.
People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them.
“Do you realize you have violated a fundamental rule of logic?” he asked. “So what!” a young woman shouted from the back of the room. “You just asked for my opinion!”
After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one’s perception of another, in relation to everyone else?
‘Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.’
