Sam Ladner > Sam's Quotes

“A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The receptivity of the artist must never be confused with passivity.”
― Rollo May, The Courage to Create

“The former morality, namely Kant’s, demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men: that was a very naive thing;”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader

“absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self/Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams

“Slavery and rebellion are inseparable correlates. Hence, rivalry for power and exaggerated distrust pervade the entire organism from top to bottom.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self/Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams

“The sense of fear and loss that accompanies the letting go of dreams that will never be is best described by the German word torschlusspanik, defined as “panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life’s opportunities has shut.”
― KathleenA. Brehony, Awakening at Midlife: Realizing Your Potential for Growth and Change

“James Hollis correctly observes, “Wisdom is always humbling, never inflationary. . . . The realistic thinking of midlife has as its necessary goal the righting of a balance, the restoration of a person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe.”
― KathleenA. Brehony, Awakening at Midlife: Realizing Your Potential for Growth and Change

“A simple thought or memory of a traumatic event, for example, has the capacity to increase our blood pressure,”
― KathleenA. Brehony, Awakening at Midlife: Realizing Your Potential for Growth and Change

“What makes heroic? – To go to meet simultaneously one’s greatest sorrow and one’s greatest hope.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader

“People are seeking less hierarchy today, not more.”
― John Zogby, The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream

“The period-effects model refers to influences specific to particular points in time—effects thought to be unique economic or demographic circumstances to which any observable fluctuations in population growth or decline may be attributed.”
― Brian A Hoey, Opting for Elsewhere: Lifestyle Migration in the American Middle Class

“For today the petty people have become lord and master: they all preach submission and acquiescence and prudence and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader

“Often in the case of these sudden transformations one can prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skilfully arranging circumstances that will unavoidably lead to a crisis.”
― C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self/Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams

“If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the “edge of chaos”:”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Diverse, horizontal social networks, in Ruef’s analysis, were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Ronald Burt, looked at the origin of good ideas inside the organizational network of the Raytheon Corporation. Burt found that innovative thinking was much more likely to emerge from individuals who bridged “structural holes” between tightly knit clusters. Employees who primarily shared information with people in their own division had a harder time coming up with useful suggestions”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“To a certain extent, Ruef’s and Burt’s research is a validation of the celebrated “strength of weak ties” argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter,”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an “idea-space”: a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing “natural” about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From