Steven Gutierrez > Steven's Quotes

“You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“For you, a thousand times over”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.”
― S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep

“Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“These people were content with their environment, and felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and organizations, and if anything welcoming these intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of 20th century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don't allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.”
― Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“There is a parallel in the behaviour of bees, which do not make the most of the system they have evolved to collect nectar and pollen. Although they have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random. In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees slavishly followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance. However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call ‘a local maximum’; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “ History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.”

“History id what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“Look, unless you're writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“...in any case over sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia