Cristian > Cristian's Quotes

“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.”
― Colette

“When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn't expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.”
― Loretta Graziano Breuning, Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels

“The stigma attached to the charging of interest was simply incompatible with the commodification of land and labour and with the Great Reversal. It had to be overturned – and so it was. The Protestants, who broke away from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, played a crucial role in this reversal. Protestantism emerged in opposition to the Pope and the cardinals’ monopoly of God. Protestants insisted that anyone could speak personally with the divinity, unmediated by an authoritarian, stifling Church. Suddenly, the person, the individual who is the director of his own affairs, became the pillar of that reformed Church.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter

“Very briefly, this simple, practical measure would be for a portion of the machines of every company to become the property of everyone – with the percentage of profits corresponding to that portion flowing into a common fund to be shared equally by all. Consider what effect that would have on the course of human history. Currently, increasing automation reduces the portion of total income that goes to workers, diverting more and more money into the pockets of the rich who own the machines. But as we have seen, this ultimately diminishes demand for their products, as the majority have less and less money to spend. But if a portion of the profits were to go automatically into the bank accounts of the workers as well, then this downward pressure on demand, sales and prices would be alleviated, turning the whole of humanity into the beneficiary of the machines’ labour.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter

“It may seem paradoxical to you that preventing the destruction of the environment by market society’s preference for exchange value over experiential value should require us to convert every last remaining experiential value into exchange value, but this type of thinking and proposal is currently all the rage.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. – Henry David Thoreau”
― Patrick Rhone, enough

“Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.”
― David Ogilvy, The Unpublished David Ogilvy

“1. First, we admire people who work hard. We dislike passengers who don’t pull their weight in the boat. 2. We admire people with first-class brains, because you cannot run a great advertising agency without brainy people. 3. We admire people who avoid politics – office politics, I mean. 4. We despise toadies who suck up to their bosses; they are generally the same people who bully their subordinates. 5. We admire the great professionals, the craftsmen who do their jobs with superlative excellence. We notice that these people always respect the professional expertise of their colleagues in other departments. 6. We admire people who hire subordinates who are good enough to succeed them. We pity people who are so insecure that they feel compelled to hire inferior specimens as their subordinates. 7. We admire people who build up and develop their subordinates, because this is the only way we can promote from within the ranks. We detest having to go outside to fill important jobs, and I look forward to the day when that will never be necessary. 8. We admire people who practice delegation. The more you delegate, the more responsibility will be loaded upon you. 9. We admire kindly people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings – particularly the people who sell things to us. We abhor quarrelsome people. We abhor people who wage paper warfare. We abhor buck passers, and people who don’t tell the truth. 10. We admire well-organized people who keep their offices shipshape, and deliver their work on time. 11. We admire people who are good citizens in their communities – people who work for their local hospitals, their church, the PTA, the Community Chest and so on.”
― David Ogilvy, The Unpublished David Ogilvy

“You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the War. You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in life’s fighting line. Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are. ‘The earth is yours and the fulness thereof.’ Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities … Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.143”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ he said in a debate in October. ‘The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“He trusted that they would be enabled to further the progress already made in rebuilding the domestic stability and economic strength of the United Kingdom and in weaving still more closely the threads which bound together the countries of the Commonwealth, or, as he still preferred to call it, the Empire.’183”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, 24 January 1965, the noble heart of Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill beat its last.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“He was a child of nature. He venerated tradition, but ridiculed convention. General Lord Ismay on Churchill”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“I’ve just become president of PepsiCo, and you couldn’t just stop and listen to my news,” I said, loudly. “You just wanted me to go get the milk!” “Listen to me,” my mother replied. “You may be the president or whatever of PepsiCo, but when you come home, you are a wife and a mother and a daughter. Nobody can take your place. “So you leave that crown in the garage.”
― Indra Nooyi, My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future

“When I had the honor of being included in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2019, I sat for a painting with four objects on a shelf behind me in the composition: a photo of my parents; a photo of Raj, Preetha, and Tara; a Yale SOM baseball cap; and a PepsiCo annual report with the words “Performance with Purpose” on the cover.”
― Indra Nooyi, My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future

“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul, there is no such thing as separation.”
― Indra Nooyi, My Life in Full: Work, Family and Our Future

“Real transformations of major tech companies are extremely rare: I think because companies develop a particular capability, and a set of customers, and change is hard. You can’t take the stripes off a tiger. If you’re born a dog, you don’t die a cat.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” — ELEANOR ROOSEVELT”
― David Robinson, The Substance of Leadership: A Practical Framework for Effectively Leading a High-Performing Team

“The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war.”
― David Robinson, The Substance of Leadership: A Practical Framework for Effectively Leading a High-Performing Team

“You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment. When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else. If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut. Both are strikingly resilient, and they will tell you about all the fires they have survived. And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from – a tree so tenacious it can fend off even the flames that aim to destroy it. If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend time beside a sugar maple. If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pretty, are no less ephemeral than vainglory. By the time you leave, you might feel a bit more humble, more grounded. To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead. And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Skills are taught experientially—meaning that students studying AI don’t have their heads buried in books. In order to learn, they need lexical databases, image libraries, and neural nets. For a time, one of the more popular neural nets at universities was called Word2vec, and it was built by the Google Brain team. It was a two-layer system that processed text, turning words into numbers that AI could understand.17 For example, it learned that “man is to king as woman is to queen.” But the database also decided that “father is to doctor as mother is to nurse” and “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.”18 The very system students were exposed to was itself biased. If someone wanted to analyze the farther-reaching implications of sexist code, there weren’t any classes where that learning could take place.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“One probable near-term outcome of AI and a through-line in all three of the scenarios is the emergence of what I’ll call a “personal data record,” or PDR. This is a single unifying ledger that includes all of the data we create as a result of our digital usage (think internet and mobile phones), but it would also include other sources of information: our school and work histories (diplomas, previous and current employers); our legal records (marriages, divorces, arrests); our financial records (home mortgages, credit scores, loans, taxes); travel (countries visited, visas); dating history (online apps); health (electronic health records, genetic screening results, exercise habits); and shopping history (online retailers, in-store coupon use). In China, a PDR would also include all the social credit score data described in the last chapter.”
― Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity

“Aides who have worked with him for years still question whether he even knew the difference between right and wrong. He never listened, never learned, never changed: he never believed he had done anything wrong.”
― Anthony Seldon, Johnson at 10: The Inside Story

“Perhaps, very soon, we will learn that Iranian and Russian trolls are bouncing the president’s messages around social media echo chambers. But even if they are, they are getting drowned out by real Americans. If the goal of Putin’s 2016 interference was to sow chaos and undermine democracy, then what is now playing out is beyond his wildest dreams.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

“Addressing Hester and the rest of the RBS board at the bank’s annual general meeting on 19 April 2011, shareholder and former SME customer Nigel Henderson said, ‘The jackboot culture is alive and kicking – literally as well as metaphorically – within your bank, despite your pious statements.’ Henderson alleges the bank misappropriated the Portree Hotel, on the Isle of Skye, and the £800,000 from the sale of the Park Hotel, in Montrose, from him. Henderson, having built a business worth £2 million making profits of £400,000, became an RBS customer in July 1997. He says, ‘Before signing two personal loan agreements for £400,000, I made it clear to the bank that we intended to redeem the proposed loans early. The bank assured us that this would be fine, that the maximum penalty would be three months’ interest, and that the loan documents would be drawn up accordingly. In November 1998 we deposited more than £800,000 with RBS, intimating we wished to exercise early redemption, as agreed. But they demanded £240,000, seized our cash and refused to allow us to exit the loans. They had embarked on a conscious process of deceit to engineer our total financial destruction.’ In early 2014, RBS headed off a Police Scotland inquiry into the matter by refusing to provide detectives with requested paperwork, and on 30 April 2014, an executive assistant of Sir Philip Hampton wrote to Henderson saying, ‘The bank’s position remains that it does not accept the allegations you continue to assert.”
― Ian Fraser, Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain

“RBS is investing tens of millions of pounds in Bó, which is positioned firmly in the personal banking space and aims to compete head-on with the likes of Monzo, a three-year-old digital bank which already has over a million customers. Named after the Danish word for ‘to stay’, Bó aims to help customers manage their finances better, for example by alerting them to better deals from utility companies. RBS reportedly intends to shift around 1 million of its roughly 17 million UK retail customers onto the Bó platform after the launch, believing such cannibalisation is preferable to losing customers to rival fintech brands.”
― Ian Fraser, Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain

“The Halifax-Bank of Scotland merger brought to an end the greatest wave of consolidation in British banking history, wholly reshaping the industry in just a few years. It had begun with NatWest bidding for Legal & General; that caused the Bank of Scotland to make a surprise hostile bid for NatWest which it lost to Royal Bank of Scotland. In the meantime Lloyds bid for Abbey National which then approached Bank of Scotland – which merged with Halifax. It seemed like a great game of musical chairs, with Lloyds, which had earlier lost Midland to HSBC, the one left out.”
― Ivan Fallon, Black Horse Ride: The Inside Story of Lloyds and the Banking Crisis