Cat > Cat's Quotes

“The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“China reminds me most of America at its own moment of transformation—the period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named the Gilded Age, when “every man has his dream, his pet scheme.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Liang Qichao, one of China’s leading reformers of the early twentieth century, hailed the importance of the individual in national development, but renounced that view after he visited San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1903 and concluded that the competition between separate Chinese clans and families was preventing Chinese people from prospering. “If we were to adopt a democratic system of government now,” he wrote, “it would be nothing less than committing national suicide.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The greatest difference between Internet dating in America and in China was conceptual: in America, it had the power to expand your universe of potential mates; in China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, online dating promised to do the opposite.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“We spoke in Chinese, but when he was surprised, he’d say, “Oh, my Lady Gaga!,” an English expression he’d picked up at school.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“(Nearly half of all Chinese tourists in one market survey reported eating no more than one “European-style” meal on a trip to the West.)”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The “Publicity” in the title was for English purposes; the Chinese name was the Central Propaganda Department, and it was one of the People’s Republic’s most powerful and secretive organizations—a government agency with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books, and recut movies.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In 2004 the Department created a Bureau of Public Opinion, which commissioned surveys and research to measure the pulse of the public without the niceties of voting.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
― Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

“Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“In any group of women who are all equally good-looking, the number of messages they get is highly correlated to the variance: from the pageant queens to the most homely women to the people right in between, the individuals who get the most affection will be the polarizing ones.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are

“Sitewide, the copy-and-paste strategy underperforms from-scratch messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory normal person + anonymity + audience = total fuckwad”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“We know that blind evolutionary processes can produce human-level general intelligence, since they have already done so at least once. Evolutionary processes with foresight—that is, genetic programs designed and guided by an intelligent human programmer—should be able to achieve a similar outcome with far greater efficiency.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“Limit catnip to once or twice a week.”
― Pam Johnson-Bennett, Think Like a Cat