Robert > Robert's Quotes

“If we don’t address the root suffering of Americans, even if you took every opioid pill away, that suffering will manifest into another social and public health problem,” he told us. “If we want to end, truly end the opioid crisis, we need to understand the basic causes of suffering and pain in America.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being. There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. —George Carlin”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs, questioning the dogmas of their political sect, and changing their minds when the facts change, rather than for being steadfast warriors for the dogmas of their clique.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“the battle between Democrats and Republicans each election cycle now came down to whether America’s squeezed middle class was more likely to identify the wealthy and powerful or the poor and minorities as the reason they weren’t doing better. I didn’t want to believe that this was all our politics had to offer. I hadn’t run simply to fan anger and allocate blame. I had run to rebuild the American people’s trust—not just in the government but in one another. If we trusted one another, democracy worked.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“As a matter of principle, I didn’t believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters—it’s what you signed up for in taking the job—and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“I might not get their vote or even agreement on most issues. But we would at least make a connection, and we’d come away from such encounters understanding that we had hopes, struggles, and values in common. I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived locked behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“There was a reason, I told Valerie, why Republicans tended to do the opposite—why Ronald Reagan could preside over huge increases in the federal budget, federal deficit, and federal workforce and still be lionized by the GOP faithful as the guy who successfully shrank the federal government. They understood that in politics, the stories told were often as important as the substance achieved.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“I was learning yet another difficult lesson about the presidency: that my heart was now chained to strategic considerations and tactical analysis, my convictions subject to counterintuitive arguments; that in the most powerful office on earth, I had less freedom to say what I meant and act on what I felt than I’d had as a senator—or as an ordinary citizen”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“But the vast majority of regulations Cass reviewed stood up to scrutiny—and by the end of my presidency, even Republican analysts would find that the benefits of our regulations outweighed their costs by a six-to-one margin.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“I realized that for all the power inherent in the seat I now occupied, there would always be a chasm between what I knew should be done to achieve a better world and what in a day, week, or year I found myself actually able to accomplish.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“Once you became president, people’s perceptions of you—even the perceptions of those who knew you best—were inevitably shaped by the media.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“The fuss of being president, the pomp, the press, the physical constraints—all that I could have done without. The actual work, though? The work, I loved. Even when it didn’t love me back.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“Only of late have the scientific data reached critical mass, confirming what our intuition and the texts told us: these deep changes are external signs of strikingly different brain function.”
― Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

“At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub “monkey mind,” for its wildly frenetic randomness.”
― Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

“For the Stoics, one key was seeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those events themselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot.”
― Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

“But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.”
― Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

“Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners, has been oddly ignored by meditation researchers, who perhaps understandably focus instead on more popular benefits like relaxation and better health.”
― Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

“These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.”
― Daniel Goleman, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

“In my research on desire, I discovered nearly unanimous agreement among thoughtful people that we are unlikely to have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our insatiability. There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“MODERN POLITICS presents another obstacle to the acceptance of Stoicism. The world is full of politicians who tell us that if we are unhappy it isn’t our fault. To the contrary, our unhappiness is caused by something the government did to us or is failing to do for us.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“Others may have it in their power to affect how and even whether you live, but they do not, say the Stoics, have it in their power to ruin your life. Only you can ruin it, by failing to live in accordance with the correct values. The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation.”
― William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

“From dopamine’s point of view, having things is uninteresting. It’s only getting things that matters. If you live under a bridge, dopamine makes you want a tent. If you live in a tent, dopamine makes you want a house. If you live in the most expensive mansion in the world, dopamine makes you want a castle on the moon. Dopamine has no standard for good, and seeks no finish line. The dopamine circuits in the brain can be stimulated only by the possibility of whatever is shiny and new, never mind how perfect things are at the moment. The dopamine motto is “More.”
― Daniel Z. Lieberman, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race

“Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Again, my goal isn’t to convince you that there’s no free will; it will suffice if you merely conclude that there’s so much less free will than you thought that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Just to show the scale of epigenetic complexity, differences in mothering styles in monkeys cause epigenetic changes in more than a thousand genes expressed in the offspring’s frontal cortex.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

“Thus, essentially every aspect of your childhood—good, bad, or in between—factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will