Brad > Brad's Quotes

“What I have written is drawn from experience — from seeing, hearing and working with mountaineers. In a land with few books and pens many tales are transmitted from father and mother to son and daughter.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“However, it is doubtless true that in a vague way some of these poorer mountaineers, fiercely independent as they were, found something abhorrent in the ownership of one person by another.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“Here the mountains were like the walls of a great jail which shut in the combatants. After Appomattox it was as though mortal enemies had been locked in the same prison without taking away the deadly weapons they knew so well how to use. Perhaps in no other region of the United States except the Southern mountains were the lives and property of a great number of pro-Union civilians lost in the war. In Pennsylvania, Kansas and a few other border areas the people were subjected to occasional Confederate forays, but those areas were comparatively rich and the losses were soon restored. But in the highlands much of the modest and slowly-built-up accumulations of three generations were destroyed, impoverishing virtually the entire population.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“Kentucky as a whole has lagged behind the rest of the nation in almost every field of government and public service, primarily because the fiercely independent and uncooperative mentality of the frontier hunter-farmer has remained so deeply and tenaciously embedded in the mass psyche.”
― Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

“A blog is a zine liberated from the annoyances of physical form.”
― Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

“Although Colbert himself would wince at the suggestion, his hilarious act of transgression was a Cooler King moment for the ages, a stroke of Gen-X triumph on a par with the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video and Quentin Tarantino’s Palme d’Or. It played out like an Oblique Strategy on a grand scale: you saw it and—blam— you were awakened.”
― Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

“Nobody was safe on South Park—and that, strangely, gave the show a prophetic kind of moral clarity.”
― Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

“I’m not interested in big monuments,” Haeg has said. “I’m interested in singular gestures that become models— small gestures in response to common issues that can be instituted by anyone.”
― Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

“Go drinking and come up with an idea and do it. I gave away the keys to the castle.” He doesn’t see Architecture for Humanity as a rigid institution. He sees it as a virus. “If we give these things away, they spread like wildfire,” he says. “The ideas get replicated.”
― Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

“Politics forces us to confront those who disagree with us, and we’re not naturally inclined to see those on the other side of an issue as rational beings.”
― Anonymous

“The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“The conscious mind is not at the center of the action in the brain; instead, it is far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“He reasoned that if choices and decisions derive from hidden mental processes, then free choice is either an illusion or, at minimum, more tightly constrained than previously considered.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“We are astoundingly poor observers. And our introspection is useless on these issues: we believe we’re seeing the world just fine until it’s called to our attention that we’re not.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is “out there” in the same way that a movie camera would.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it’s true, that doesn’t mean it is true.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive—it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“The drives you take for granted (“I’m a hetero/homosexual,” “I’m attracted to children/adults,” “I’m aggressive/not aggressive,” and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“It’s practically common sense that men should have unrealistic expectations of women’s looks, and yet here we see it’s just not true.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“It even has a name. It’s called WEIRD research: white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And most published social research papers are WEIRD.1”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“until thirty, a woman prefers slightly older guys; afterward, she likes them slightly younger.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“if “over the hill” means the beginning of a person’s decline, a straight woman is over the hill as soon as she’s old enough to drink.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the real moral here is: be yourself and be brave about it. Certainly trying to fit in, just for its own sake, is counterproductive.”
― 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

“Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters—it”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“the DOLLY Project (Digital OnLine Life and You)—it’s a searchable repository of every geotagged tweet since December 2011,”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“If employers begin to use algorithms to infer how intelligent you are or whether you use drugs, then your only choice will be to game the system—or,”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“A therapist once said to me that I was a good storyteller, but he didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
― Ben Tanzer, Lost in Space: A Father's Journey There and Back Again