Rod Olson > Rod's Quotes

“No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.”
― Orson F. Whitney

“Education, human education, is the leading out and lifting up of the soul into the ripe, full enjoyment of all its powes potential. To educate men and women is to put them in full command of themselves, to completely possess them of their faculties, which are only half possessed until they are educated. Education imparts nothing but discipline and development. It does not increase the number of man's original talents; it adds nothing to the sum of his inherent capabilities; but it improves those talents, it develops and strengthens those capabilities, brightening what is dull, making the crude fine, the clumsy skillful, the small great, and the great still greater. Education supplements creation, and moves next to it in the order of infinite progression.”
― Orson F. Whitney

“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.”
― Anonymous

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
― Ann Druyan

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
― James Baldwin

“I did then what I knew best, when I knew better, I did better. Maya Angelo”
― Maya Angelou

“Silence isn't golden, it's deadly. It's a vacuum that fills up with ghosts.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Shadowfever

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
― Desmond Tutu (Foreword)

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical
exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the
same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course
of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of
skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Familiarity breeds liking.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.”
― Kahneman