Hrvoje > Hrvoje's Quotes

“Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“I find many adults are put off when young children pose scientific questions. Why is the Moon round? the children ask. Why is grass green? What is a dream? How deep can you dig a hole? When is the world’s birthday? Why do we have toes? Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else: ‘What did you expect the Moon to be, square?’ Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys the grown-ups. A few more experiences like it, and another child has been lost to science. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before 6-year-olds, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that we don’t know something? Is our self-esteem so fragile?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
― Walter Lippmann

“Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

“We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow