The Girl from Krakow Quotes

“You know, seeing the world straight doesn’t make you smarter or better. It might just make you worse and more complacent about things.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Doing right means nothing more than minimizing human misery.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“why did rail journeys always provoke interior monologues of philosophy?”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“natural selection a couple of hundred thousand years. It’s sure to find ways to make you hate strangers who might be threats to survival. Better safe than sorry. Hate all strangers. The best way of making you hate strangers who just might hurt you is the way religion does it. It even gets you to give up your life for some greater cause—protecting your tribe from the strangers.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“shriek,”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“your emotions are screaming at you. But your emotions have no foresight. They can’t look ahead. They only look back to what enabled your ancestors to survive. If you allow them to overmaster you in the life-or-death choice you face, you’ll regret it in a future that your emotions cannot see.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Who is it, really, peering out at the world from inside my body, and why did it turn out to be me?”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Yes, your emotions are screaming at you. But your emotions have no foresight. They can’t look ahead. They only look back to what enabled your ancestors to survive. If you allow them to overmaster you in the life-or-death choice you face, you’ll regret it in a future that your emotions cannot see.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“dissimulate”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“traduced”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“You see, Magda, Darwin showed that purpose in nature is an illusion. Whatever looks planned and organized to attain some end is just the result of blind variation that gets filtered by a passive environment—whether in nature or culture.” Here she looked at Dani. “Denying it is turning your”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“That brings up the Nazis’ second huge misunderstanding of Herr Darwin. He never thought that there was anything morally good or right or best about surviving, or even becoming the dominant species in an environment. There is nothing in Darwin that says might makes right.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Give natural selection a couple of hundred thousand years. It’s sure to find ways to make you hate strangers who might be threats to survival. Better safe than sorry. Hate all strangers. The best way of making you hate strangers who just might hurt you is the way religion”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“patient file came to Gil’s desk for a”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Evolution is inevitable. But the process isn’t going from lower to higher. It’s just going from different to different—today’s fittest are likely to be tomorrow’s unfit. It’s environments that decide fitness, and environments change.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Why was she alive? Intelligence, foresight, the right decisions? How foolish to think that. Better to ask why thought always seeks stories, meaning. Why do we endlessly try to make sense of things? Why are we never satisfied with the right answer—dumb luck? Why do we always crave a motive? And why did rail journeys always provoke interior monologues of philosophy?”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Most people were no worse than indifferent to other people’s fate”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“People aren’t the parasites. It’s the ideas that infect people and spread from them to others . . . and destroy each one. But not before the parasite has the chance to spread further. Ideas spread like the germs of a disease. Like the deadliest diseases, they die out because they kill their hosts before they can jump to new ones.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“The knot tightening in her gut always came with a question, one she couldn’t really frame further than its first two words: Why this? Why now? Why us? Why me? Sometimes”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“It’s the ideas that infect people and spread from them to others . . . and destroy each one. But not before the parasite has the chance to spread further. Ideas spread like the germs of a disease. Like the deadliest diseases, they die out because they kill their hosts before they can jump to new ones.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“ideas that make cooperation in your tribe possible are just like any other parasite, only they invade the brain instead of the liver, say. The brain parasites survive and spread because of what they do to and for their hosts—us. So ideas that make us band together, especially against strangers, are going to be encouraged by the same forces of evolution that made it possible for us to kill off the woolly mammoth, right?”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Mädchen, but that was not going to make a”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“ ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“Generalgouvernement.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“by Hitler and Mussolini. Their caudillo,”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“days”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“the”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“building”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“petite mort.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow

“So the two things the Nazis think they take from Darwin aren’t there at all. No master race, no progress, just change. No glorification of violence or overlordship as morally right.”
― Alex Rosenberg, The Girl from Krakow