Julia > Julia's Quotes

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Carl Sagan

“The more ignorant we become the less value we set on science, and the less inclination we shall have to seek it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“I understand that some people find God after misfortune, although this seems to me even more ridiculous than finding Him in good times. 'God smote me. He must love me.' It's like not wanting a romantic relationship until a member of the opposite sex punches you in the face. My 'miraculous survival' will not change my opinion that Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short, and paradoxically, far too long. ”
― Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
― Theodore Parker

“A people on fire has no time to fan other people's flames.”
― Heid E. Erdrich, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota

“I often considered whether there could perhaps be found a more reasonable arrangement of circles.”
― Nicolaus Copernicus, Commentariolus (Perfect Library)

“He must be getting old. It was like there were a thousand little librarians smacking him upside the head with big fat reference books.”
― Jeannie Moon, Then Came You

“Nothing makes us believe more than fear, the certainty of being threatened. When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed, or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we're acting in self-defense. Evil, menace -- those are always the preserve of the other. The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient, is only a lighted match.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

“Part of the problem is, you've got a lot of D students left on the farm today," Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. "The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There's been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course, that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the farm and put them to work in Dilbert's cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems." This isn't just the farmer's problem, either. "It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“Make another list. A list of what you did today. It doesn't matter what day it is, weekday, weekend, holiday, birthday, the calendar date is irrelevant. Write down all the things that occupied your time on a given day. Woke up, ate breakfast, hit the gym, went to work, surfed the Internet, had a coffee with a colleague, did some work, ate some lunch, did some more work, slipped out to buy new sneakers, clicked around on social media sites, went home, called a parent, watched TV, ate dinner, changed outfits, met someone for a drink, made out with them on a street corner, caught a taxi home, read a book, went to sleep.

That's what you believe in. According to Greta, your belief system is how you actually spend your time every day.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“That's all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It's always open to revision. Yesterday's fact is today's question and tomorrow has an answer we don't know yet.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf,
Dein Vater hüt die Schaf,
Die Mutter schüttelts Bäumelein,
Da fällt herab ein Träumelein,
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf.”
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

“Publicly, in front of almost two thousand people, I said that I define American by the people who have been excluded from the promise of America, which includes African Americans and Native Americans. I recited a quote from James Baldwin, words that I committed to memory the moment I read them while scouring through books at the Mountain View Public Library: "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“the largest groups of people who migrate to the U.S.A.—voluntarily, forcibly, unknowingly, like them—do so because of what the U.S. government has done to their countries. How a trade agreement, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, drove millions of Mexicans out of jobs and led parents to cross borders and climb up walls so they could feed their kids. How six decades of interventionist policies by both Republicans and Democrats brought economic and political instability and sowed violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“A 2014 article published in Politico found that the U.S. government spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Marshals.”
― Jose Antonio Vargas, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen

“This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery will be handed over to robots by the accountants. We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.”
― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

“A study commissioned by the NFL Players Association determined that recently retired pros (ages thirty to forty-nine) are nineteen times more likely to suffer from brain-trauma-related illness than—what's the right word here?—noncombatants.”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“What would happen if some invisible gas leak in the school cafeteria caused diminished brain activity in students? Can we safely assume district officials would evacuate the school until further notice? That parents would be up in arms? That media and lawyers would descend in droves to collect statements from the innocent victims? Can we assume that the community would not gather together en masse on Friday nights to eat hot dogs and watch the gas leak?”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“Three years ago, researchers at Purdue University began monitoring every hit sustained by two high school teams. The goal was to study the effect of concussions. But when researchers administered cognitive tests to players who had never been concussed, hoping to set up a control group, they discovered that these teens showed diminished brain function as well. As the season wore on, their cognitive abilities plummeted. In some cases, brain activity in the frontal lobes—the region responsible for reasoning—nearly disappeared by season’s end. "You have the classic stereotype of the dumb jock and I think the real issue is that’s not how they start out," explained Thomas Talavage, one of the professors of the study. "We actually create that individual.”
― Steve Almond, Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

“At the Alley Cat Allies conference, I sit through a very technical presentation on Tomahawk trap trip plates, postoperative temperature control, and other TNR mechanics. As the sober PowerPoint concludes, the presenter suddenly flashes a slide of an adorable feline neonate: "And this is my kitten Rex!" she says. The room explodes in squeals. It was a bit like ending a lecture on the war on drugs with a picture of a lit crack pipe—especially since there is actually some evidence that cats, like street drugs, have clinically compromised our minds.”
― Abigail Tucker, The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World

“After the 1938 Munich Conference, every book in the Czech language that dealt with geography, biography, or history was confiscated and either burned or mashed into pulp. In Vilnius, Lithuania, the library in the Jewish ghetto was set on fire. A few months later the residents of the ghetto were shipped to concentration camps and gassed, illustrating the truth in German poet Heinrich Heine's warning: "There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“The river was too low to allow the Magnet passage. Audubon proposed to Victor that they walk the 250 miles to Louisville and he agreed.”
― Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American

“In the presence of the physicians and academics who were Lyceum members his lack of formal education embarrassed him despite his hard-won ornithological expertise. "Among such people," he wrote, "I feel clouded and depressed; remember that I have done nothing, and fear that I may die unknown.”
― Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American

“In the digital universe, a punctuated sentence is as powerful a slap as slamming down the landline.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“If it be questioned how the population of the country can supply sufficient numbers of these duties, and by what means they can be supported, we may answer, that all the idolaters, and likewise the Saracens, keep six, eight, or ten women, according to their circumstances, by whom they have a prodigious number of children. Some of them have as many as thirty sons capable of following their fathers in arms; whereas with us a man has only one wife, and even although she should prove barren, he is obliged to pass his life with her, and is by that means deprived of the chance of raising a family. Hence it is that our population is so much inferior to theirs.”
― Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian

“Moreover, no public woman resides inside the city, but all such abide outside in the suburbs. And 'tis wonderful what a vast number of these are for the foreigners; ...”
― Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian

“The inhabitants are all Idolaters. And I may as well remind you again [implied sigh?] that all the people of Cathay are Idolaters.”
― Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian

“Here is a preserve of holothurian that a Malay would declare to be unmatched anywhere in the world; there is a cream supplied by the udders of cetaceans, and sugar by the great fucus plants that grow in the North Sea; finally, let me offer you some anemone jam, which is as good as that made from the most tasty fruits.”
― Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea