Andrea Ruby > Andrea's Quotes

“Prisons are full of sociopaths and psychopaths, but when questioned, the imprisoned sociopath will honestly admit that they will commit any number of crimes to help a friend.

A friend will help you move; a true friend will help you move a body.

A friend will bail you out of jail; a true friend will be sitting beside you.

Who wouldn’t want to have a true friend? But they sound a lot like a sociopath.”
― Tanya Thompson, Assuming Names: A Con Artist's Masquerade

“We all have a tendency to surrender our moral authority to “the group,” to still our own voices and assume that the group will handle whatever difficult issue we face. We imagine that the group is making thoughtful decisions, and if the crowd is moving in a certain direction, we follow, as if the group is some moral entity larger than ourselves. In the face of the herd, our tendency is to go quiet and let the group’s brain and soul handle things. Of course, the group has no brain or soul separate from each of ours. But by imagining that the group has these centers, we abdicate responsibility, which allows all groups to be hijacked by the loudest voice, the person who knows how brainless groups really are and uses that to his advantage.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Years ago, Re had raged against humans for violating Ma’at, so he had sent Hathor to destroy mankind. She transformed into the lion goddess Sekhmet and Egypt’s fields ran red with the blood of her rampage. Seeing this, Re realized his mistake and ordered Sekhmet to stop, but she was too gone with bloodlust to listen. Knowing he had to halt her some other way, Re stained seven thousand jugs of beer with pomegranate juice and poured the red liquid into her path. Believing the beer to be blood, Sekhmet gorged herself and passed out in a drunken stupor. When she awoke, her bloodlust had passed and she returned to being Hathor. Thus the goddesses of love and violence shared a common history.”
― Stephanie Thornton, Daughter of the Gods: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

“From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race”—and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The conscience told the tears “I know you really want me to cry But if I release you from bondage, In gaining your freedom you die.” The tears gave it some thought Before giving the conscience an answer “If crying brings you to triumph Then dying’s not such a disaster.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“Nail clippers: As you may have noticed, trimming your nails is a traumatic event that requires three people, a beach towel, and a can of spray cheese.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

“But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,’ I said. ‘Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test

“What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it’s dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?”
― Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

“I request America to look into our hearts and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people. Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education. - Syed Abbas”
― Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

“as the old pharaoh was laid to rest, allowing her brother to claim his place fully upon the Isis Throne.”
― Stephanie Thornton, Daughter of the Gods: A Novel of Ancient Egypt

“He was a happy man. This is the person I want to be, I thought. My effort at life-plagiarism has been imperfect, but the lessons were priceless. That is what it means to lead and keep a life.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“It makes perfect sense that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households; if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place, then they will grow up with a healthy relationship toward themselves and other people. - able to give love freely and receive it in return. Conversely, if a person is severely mistreated from his earliest years, subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse, he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation.”
― Harold Schechter, The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

“Write like you're running out of time...”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton 10 Selections from the Hit Musical - Book/Online Audio

“Three Plagues of nursing home existence: boredom, loneliness, and helplessness.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. —William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“So red teaming is: You take people who aren’t wedded to the plan and [ask them,] ‘How would you disrupt this plan or how would you defeat this plan?’ If you have a very thoughtful red team, you’ll produce stunning results.”
― Timothy Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

“It just feels like you want us to give you the formula for Coke in order to convince you that it doesn’t contain arsenic,” King said.

“Nobody’s asked for the formula for Coke!” Jay replied, annoyed.”
― John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

“When deathcare became an industry in the early twentieth century, there was a seismic shift in who was responsible for the dead. Caring for the corpse went from visceral, primeval work performed by women to a “profession,” an “art,” and even a “science,” performed by well-paid men.”
― Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

“Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study.”
― Timothy Egan, Short Nights Of The Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

“Only then did I see. Something was amiss with Patrick's snap-on one piece, or "onesie" as we manly dads like to call it. His chubby thighs, I now realized, were squeezed into the armholes, which were so tight they must have been cutting off his circulation. The collared neck hung between his legs like an udder. Up top, Patrick's head stuck out through the unsnapped crotch, and his arms were lost somewhere in the billowing pant legs. It was quite a look.”
― John Grogan, Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog

“In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction.”
― Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

“All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory” was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“The idea is that people in positions of power should avoid making jokes at the expense of the powerless. That’s”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

“You never know what you can achieve so long as you never stop trying.”
― Stephanie Thornton, The Secret History: A Novel of Empress Theodora

“You don’t tell Elon you can’t do something. That will get you kicked out of the room. You need everything lined up. After we presented the plan, he said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ Everyone was like, ‘Holy shit, he didn’t fire you.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“Even with the misdemeanor, the Department of Justice has long required that investigators develop strong evidence to indicate government employees knew they were doing something improper in their handling of the classified information.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“Immediate gratification takes too long.”
― Carrie Fisher