André > André's Quotes

“If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth’s net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world’s human population now doubling every forty-one years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world’s fixed pie of resources. In addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world’s species will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our own life support.”
― Jared Diamond, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live

“Some of those solutions include halting population growth, limiting or eliminating nuclear weapons, developing peaceful means for solving international disputes, reducing our impact on the environment, and preserving species and natural habitats.”
― Jared Diamond, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live

“This trait has direct animal precursors – namely, the contests between competing individuals and groups that, in many species besides our own, may be resolved by murder.”
― Jared Diamond, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live

“Animal populations that for one reason or another escaped control by predators and parasites have in some cases also escaped their own internal controls on their numbers, multiplied until they damaged their resource base, and occasionally have eaten their way into extinction.”
― Jared Diamond, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live

“The islanders, they write: carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash…. Do we have to repeat the experiment on [a] grand scale?… Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree?”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History Of Progress

“Our word “lord” comes from the Old English hlaford, or “loafward,” he who guarded the bread supply — and was expected to share it.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History Of Progress

“The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible ….” So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History Of Progress

“Sun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously. Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company.”
― Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader