Red > Red's Quotes

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”
― Neal Stephenson

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient," Said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball

“A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.”
― Daniel Kahneman

“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Now, you may think that this is some sort of generalized hatred that I will carry for the lot of you. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Each of you will fail, but you will fail in your own unique way, and therefore I will dislike each of you on an individual basis.”
― John Scalzi, Old Man's War

“Early to bed and early to rise," Mazer intoned, "makes a man stupid and blind in the eyes.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“I'm not insane, sir. I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”
― John Scalzi, Old Man's War

“The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”
― M.R. Carey, The Girl With All the Gifts

“In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears.

'Son of a bitch,' Dauntless said. 'He caught it.'

Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn't talk much.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

“It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician King