Ginés > Ginés's Quotes

“Knowledge and skill diffusion is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“the population of the world grew at an average annual rate of barely 0.8 percent between 1700 and 2012.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Something broadly analogous happens when we contemplate historical events, especially catastrophic ones like the First World War. Once they occur, they impose on us (or seem to do so) a sense of their necessity. This is a process”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Here again is the tendency we can discern in the reasoning of so many of the actors in this crisis, to perceive oneself as operating under irresistible external constraints while placing the responsibility for deciding between peace and war firmly on the shoulders of the opponent.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“Diffie and Hellman suggested such a system, but their protocol is not as commonly used as a scheme discovered by three computer scientists, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, in 1978 and named “RSA” after them.”
― Lance Fortnow, The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible

“Both linguists and archaeologists have made communication across the disciplines almost impossible by speaking in dense jargons that are virtually impenetrable to anyone but themselves.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Nel suo genere x’è un dio. X’è il genere che x’è merda.”
― Umberto Eco, Numero zero

“La forza che tiene incollati i quarks all’interno dei protoni e dei neutroni è generata da particelle che i fisici, con poco senso del ridicolo, chiamano «gluoni», dall’inglese glue, colla. In italiano si tradurrebbe «colloni», ma fortunatamente usano tutti il nome inglese.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Sette brevi lezioni di fisica

“Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider”
― Carlo Rovelli, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

“FRONTA NULLA FIDES. Place”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Anche le parole che ora diciamo il tempo nella sua rapina ha già portato via e nulla torna (I, 11)”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo

“New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“We have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped – say what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company?”
― William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

“Congress had denounced Catholics for “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Now it found “the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked” by their common antipathy to British oppression. In a gesture of tolerance and perhaps to forestall charges of hypocrisy, Congress also acknowledged that Catholics deserved “liberty of conscience.” If nothing else, the Canadian gambit caused Americans to contemplate the practical merits of inclusion, moderation, and religious freedom. The Northern Army, as the invasion host was named, was to be a liberating force, not a vengeful one.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Sarah had always hoped that Purrdey loved her, but it’s difficult to tell with cats. The real test of their loyalty and affection is whether, left alone with your dead body, they refuse to eat you.”
― Christopher Shevlin, The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax

“As L. P. Hartley famously wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’20”
― Daniel M. Davis, The Beautiful Cure: The Revolution in Immunology and What It Means for Your Health

“The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“N’allez pas là où le chemin vous mène. Allez là où il n’y a pas encore de chemin et laissez une nouvelle trace.”
― Hervé Le Tellier, L'Anomalie

“In a situation where the consequences of wrong decisions are so awesome, where a single bit of irrationality can set a whole train of traumatic events in motion, I do not think that we can be satisfied with the assurance that “most people behave rationally most of the time”.’ C. E. Osgood”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail—we are ruined by forces beyond our control.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“I have no country. I don’t want one. The root of all evil, the cause of every war—god and country.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy. There are many ways of doing that, but none is easier than taking her name away from her.”
― Fredrik Backman, Beartown

“There is only one thing more contemptible than a competent dictatorship and that is an incompetent one.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“As in 1842, the British understood the principle of Afghan war: strike hard and then get out fast, leaving a friendly ruler. ‘It may not be very flattering to our amour propre,’ wrote Bobs, ‘but…the less the Afghans see of us the less they’ll dislike us.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Rulers, statesmen and nations are often advised to learn the lesson of historical experience. But what experience and history teach is that nations and governments have never learned anything from history. Hegel”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, The World: A Family History of Humanity

“Its ideal mode of behaviour was what in German was called Kadavergehorsam (‘corpse-like obedience’).”
― Richard J. Evans, Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich

“The shift from serving advertisers to satisfying subscribers changes everything. Now”
― Natasha Brown, Universality

“An obsession with technology has spawned what is perhaps the most interesting online movement in China. In the heavily censored realm of the Chinese internet”
― Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future