John > John's Quotes

“The other side’s version,” Kolokoltsov thought. Even here, he’s not willing to call it “the truth.” Whoever said truth is the first casualty of war damned well knew what he was talking about!”
― David Weber, Uncompromising Honor

“It was contrast that gave things shape. Brightness made darkness. Fullness made emptiness. Loneliness defined the borders of whatever not-loneliness was called. They were comparative.”
― James S.A. Corey, Tiamat's Wrath

“I divided myself into three different young men: one a nurse to his failing mother, one a fierce student on a quest to understand the disease that was defining his life, and the last a victim of depression so profound it made bathing or eating food a challenge.”
― James S.A. Corey, The Vital Abyss

“There is also a running wobble between extreme precision, specious or otherwise, and approximation (“just over fifteen hundred”, “just over sixty-nine percent”), so the whole risks annoying non-geek and ultra-geek readers, garnering the worst of both worlds.”
― John Lennard, The Exasperating Case of David Weber, or, The Slow Death of the Honorverse

“The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Starbucks is, unsurprisingly, the only thing open in this storm, commerce’s cockroach”
― Jess Walter, The Way the World Ends

“That’s pretty much a rule in electronics: You never get diodes right on the first try.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“I’ve gone from “sole-surviving space explorer” to “guy with wacky new roommate.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

“That is, some want the dreamed America because it means racism can no longer be used as a crutch, while others will be glad that it can no longer be used as a cudgel.”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“This kind of discrimination painfully reveals an ugly truth to a country justifiably proud of its progress: one does not have to be called a nigger to be treated like one.”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“Instead, the fact that racism is an existential threat is less about the durability of the United States as a sovereign entity and more about the death of the American idea.”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“America is the only nation founded on an idea—not an identity. That idea is the notion that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life.”33”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“because national apologies are not moral gestures—they are political ones.”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“Black Americans recognize the necessity of standing in solidarity, but they also have a human desire to be distinct and unique. Racism attacks both. It exacerbates the need for unity while also reducing black people to a throng of carbon copies—it makes solidarity an existential imperative and mutes the individualism of each group member. The consequence is a group seen as homogenous by those on the outside looking in and as heterogeneous by those on the inside peering out, creating a destructive incongruence between how black citizens are viewed and how they view themselves.”
― Theodore Roosevelt Johnson III, When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America

“People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort.”
― Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock

“Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.”
― Neal Stephenson, Termination Shock

“Maybe Socrates would rather be right than popular, but most of us prefer to maintain our good standing with our tribe, a reasonable call when one considers that Socrates was executed by his fellow citizens.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Wrong beliefs and wrong perceptions are contagious whether or not they are sincere, because dissidents tend to self-censor and act like believers. That is how entire societies, such as the Soviet Union, can be built on everyone’s publicly pretending to believe what many privately know to be false. After a while, in a community where people are struggling to conform with each other, it can be very hard, even in principle, to know whether people are sincere or faking, or even which is which.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“27 If we go in for quackery or conspiracy theories, that is often because the personal cost of believing is low and the personal reward of believing is high. Believing that 9/11 was a government plot or that Barack Obama was not born in America does us no personal harm, but it can help us feel enmeshed in a special group of insiders with privileged information. Experiments show that a good way to help people think more rigorously and accurately is to pay them to get the right answer; when they have skin in the game, the personal cost of being wrong goes up.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

“Every year, Gallup releases a wide-ranging study of the effects of “lack of engagement,” which it measures through a twelve-question survey asking employees to gauge their agreement with various statements, from “I know what is expected of me at work” to “At work, my opinions seem to count.” Within Gallup’s conception, “engagement” is a measurement of how much employees themselves are invested in the work but also of how much their managers and leaders are investing in them.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Work expands to fill the time available to it, and digital technologies gradually and efficiently carved more and more time out of our nonwork lives.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“In both situations, few companies find reason to recalibrate. If the work is getting done with fewer people, why change what isn’t broken? The problem, of course, is that the worker is breaking. It might take several years for that breakage to have measurable ramifications, but it will. The recent shift to remote work has offered a unique opportunity to discern just how much work you’re doing. Not “official” work done in the office versus furtive work done at home, but total work.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“For managers, whose jobs often have less visible outputs, this may feel especially hard, but it is crucially important. Think about how you spend your time each day. Are you calling meetings because you relish those moments where everyone’s in the same space, or does each meeting have a specific goal? Are your meetings serving each employee, or are they simply the easiest way for you to download information? If the answer is that it primarily serves you, then chances are you are creating more work with tertiary, administrative tasks that you’re passing along to others. It’s not your fault. It’s part of a classic trap where performative work begets more performative work.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home