Jack > Jack's Quotes

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”
― Frank Zappa

“Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”
― Confucius, The Book of Rites

“Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief.

Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music?

How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?”
― Orson Scott Card

“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Tell me what you listen to, and I'll tell you who you are.”
― Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star

“I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”
― Edith Wharton

“I do not believe in taking the right decision, I take a decision and make it right.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“If you can quit, quit. If you can't quit, stop complaining - this is what you chose.”
― Joe Konrath

“What is the difference between an obstacle and an opportunity? Our attitude toward it. Every opportunity has a difficulty, and every difficulty has an opportunity.”
― J. Sidlow Baxter

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't—you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“Cultivate an optimistic mind, use your imagination, always consider alternatives, and dare to believe that you can make possible what others think is impossible.”
― Rodolfo Costa, Advice My Parents Gave Me: and Other Lessons I Learned from My Mistakes

“Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we can be”
― Tony Robbins

“Emotional baggage,” which is carried over from the past, colors our perceptions. Likewise, past conclusions and beliefs, based on reasoning that may or may not have been accurate, also tint our perception of reality. Retaining our capacity for reason is common sense, but definite conclusions and beliefs keep us from seeing life as it really is at any given moment.

Emotional reactions can be unreasonable, and reason can be flawed. It’s difficult to have deep confidence in either one, especially when they’re often at war with each other. But the universal mind exists in the instant, in a moment beyond time, and it sees the universe as it literally is. It’s the universe perceiving itself. It is, moreover, something we can have absolute confidence in, and with that confidence, we can maintain a genuinely positive attitude.”
― H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

“A positive attitude is most easily arrived at through a deliberate and rational analysis of what’s required to manifest unwavering positive thought patterns. First, reflect on the actual, present condition of your mind. In other words, is the mind positive or not? We’ve all met individuals who perceive themselves as positive people but don’t appear as such. Since the mind is both invisible and intangible, it’s therefore easier to see the accurate characteristics of the mind through a person’s words, deeds, and posture.

For example, if we say, “It’s absolutely freezing today! I’ll probably catch a cold before the end of the day!” then our words expose a negative attitude. But if we say, “The temperature is very cold” (a simple statement of fact), then our expressions, and therefore attitude, are not negative. Sustaining an alert state in which self-awareness becomes possible gives us a chance to discover the origins of negativity. In doing so, we also have an opportunity to arrive at a state of positiveness, so that our words and deeds are also positive, making others feel comfortable, cheerful, and inspired.”
― H.E. Davey

“Life is full of surprises, so you may as well get used to it.”
― Susan Meddaugh, Cinderella's Rat

“A positive attitude may not solve all our problems but that is the only option we have if we want to get out of problems.
-Subodh Gupta author "Stress Management a holistic approach -5 steps plan".”
― Subodh Gupta, Stress Management A Holistic Approach

“Believing in negative thoughts is the single greatest obstruction to success.”
― Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain - The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life

“Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty of teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system of negations, of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very roots of life. It is a far nobler, far more difficult task. The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life, the value of humanity, despite the morbid prejudices of Puritanism, the timid conventionality of the mob, despite even his own knowledge of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and death.”
― John Gould Fletcher, Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art

“operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months’ salary”;”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Human nature may be studied, just as anything else in the world may be. And our decisions on how to organize our lives can take the facts of human nature into account—including the discounting of our own intuitions when a scientific understanding casts them in doubt.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. This foundation of morality may be seen in the many versions of the Golden Rule that have been discovered by the world’s major religions, and also in Spinoza’s Viewpoint of Eternity, Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hobbes and Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Locke and Jefferson’s self-evident truth that all people are created equal.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“On the heels of the Enlightenment came the French Revolution: a brief promise of democracy followed by a train of regicides, putsches, fanatics, mobs, terrors, and preemptive wars, culminating in a megalomaniacal emperor and an insane war of conquest. More than a quarter of a million people were killed in the Revolution and its aftermath, and another 2 to 4 million were killed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In reflecting on this catastrophe, it was natural for people to reason, “After this, therefore because of this,” and for intellectuals on the right and the left to blame the Enlightenment. This is what you get, they say, when you eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge,”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history” is a cliché that has been used to indict a vast range of demons, including atheism, Darwin, government, science, capitalism, communism, the ideal of progress, and the male gender. But is it true? The claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the 20th, or by a mention of the hemoclysms of centuries past. The truth is that we will never really know which was the worst century, because it’s hard enough to pin down death tolls in the 20th century, let alone earlier ones.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“The population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion, which is about two and a half times the population in 1800, four and a half times that in 1600, seven times that in 1300, and fifteen times that of 1 CE. So the death count of a war in 1600, for instance, would have to be multiplied by 4.5 for us to compare its destructiveness to those in the middle of the 20th century.9”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“The second illusion is historical myopia: the closer an era is to our vantage point in the present, the more details we can make out. Historical myopia can afflict both common sense and professional history. The cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have shown that people intuitively estimate relative frequency using a shortcut called the availability heuristic: the easier it is to recall examples of an event, the more probable people think it is.10 People, for example, overestimate the likelihoods of the kinds of accidents that make headlines, such as plane crashes, shark attacks, and terrorist bombings, and they underestimate those that pile up unremarked, like electrocutions, falls, and drownings.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“In a survey of historical memory, I asked a hundred Internet users to write down as many wars as they could remember in five minutes. The responses were heavily weighted toward the world wars, wars fought by the United States, and wars close to the present. Though the earlier centuries, as we shall see, had far more wars, people remembered more wars from the recent centuries.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“When you scale by population size, only one of the 20th century’s atrocities even makes the top ten. The worst atrocity of all time was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China’s Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire’s population, a sixth of the world’s population at the time.13”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined