Emma soloviev > Emma soloviev's Quotes

“Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: “The human being is the only animal that . . .” We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence. We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with “can use language” were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with “uses tools.” So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an “anticipation machine,” and “making future” is the most important thing it does.2”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“Surprise tells us that we were expecting something other than what we got, even when we didn’t know we were expecting anything at all.”
― Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“Remember that words are the only tools you’ve got. Learn to use them with originality and care. And also remember: somebody out there is listening.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“The older shipwrights erred on the side of flexibility, and, though their ships were often excessively leaky, they seldom actually broke at sea. It required the administrative abilities of modern war-time governments to produce wooden ships which really did fall to pieces.”
― J.E. Gordon, Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down

“Shut up, he explained,”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain,2 neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained a groundbreaking discovery he made. Studying people who had damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated, he found that they all had something peculiar in common: They couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should do in logical terms, but they found it impossible to make even the simplest choice. In other words, while we may use logic to reason ourselves toward a decision, the actual decision making is governed by emotion.”
― Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

“When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion—you fall to your highest level of preparation.”
― Chris Voss

“the absence of an ‘international standard burglar’, the nearest I know to a working classification is one developed by a U.S. Army expert [118]. Derek is a 19-year old addict. He's looking for a low-risk opportunity to steal something he can sell for his next fix. Charlie is a 40-year old inadequate with seven convictions for burglary. He's spent seventeen of the last twenty-five years in prison. Although not very intelligent he is cunning and experienced; he has picked up a lot of ‘lore’ during his spells inside. He steals from small shops and suburban houses, taking whatever he thinks he can sell to local fences. Bruno is a ‘gentleman criminal’. His business is mostly stealing art. As a cover, he runs a small art gallery. He has a (forged) university degree in art history on the wall, and one conviction for robbery eighteen years ago. After two years in jail, he changed his name and moved to a different part of the country. He has done occasional ‘black bag’ jobs for intelligence agencies who know his past. He'd like to get into computer crime, but the most he's done so far is stripping $100,000 worth of memory chips from a university's PCs back in the mid-1990s when there was a memory famine. Abdurrahman heads a cell of a dozen militants, most with military training. They have infantry weapons and explosives, with PhD-grade technical support provided by a disreputable country. Abdurrahman himself came third out of a class of 280 at the military academy of that country but was not promoted because he's from the wrong ethnic group. He thinks of himself as a good man rather than a bad man. His mission is to steal plutonium. So Derek is unskilled, Charlie is skilled, Bruno is highly skilled and may have the help of an unskilled insider such as a cleaner, while Abdurrahman is not only highly skilled but has substantial resources.”
― Ross J. Anderson, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems

“won’t”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“afternoon”
― Wendy Mass, A Mango-Shaped Space