The Hypomanic Edge Quotes

“For the hypomanic, the only escape from a black hole is a big bang.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Virtually every new movement in human history—religious, political, intellectual, and economic—has been led by a charismatic leader.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Ideas pour out of hypomanics, a mix of the ridiculous and the brilliant.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Every hypomanic child or young adult has a larger-than-life historic figure with whom he identifies, who becomes the raw material for a secret grandiose identity.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Great entrepreneurs often do not create original ideas—they grasp the significance of an idea, wherever it comes from, and leap on it with everything they have.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“If a scientist wanted to design a giant petri dish with all the right nutrients to make hypomanic genius flourish, he would be hard-pressed to imagine a better natural experiment than America. A “nation of immigrants” represents a highly skewed and unusual “self-selected” population. Do men and women who risk everything to leap into a new world differ temperamentally from those who stay home? It would be surprising if they didn’t.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Successful entrepreneurs are not just braggarts. They are highly creative people who quickly generate a tremendous number of ideas—some clever, others ridiculous.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence, and really big ideas. They think, talk, move, and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions “just doesn’t get it.” Hypomanics are not crazy, but “normal” is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, betweeen normal and abnormal.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Most of the people who came here without official sanction overcame many obstacles, proving they are people of drive, initiative, and courage.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Up until 2003, only God could claim to have created life. The Almighty must now share that honor with a hypomanic American.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“With this advance, it is easier to imagine, in the not-too-distant future, a colony of specially designed microbes living within the emission-control system of a coal-fired plant, consuming its pollution and its carbon dioxide, or employing microbes to radically reduce water pollution, or to reduce the toxic effects of radioactive waste.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Today’s scientists would not be surprised if our grandchildren lived to 120. But ultimately, there is no absolute limit that we know of.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“by turning on genes that activate regeneration and turning off others that activate aging.138 Stopping the aging process might be as simple as taking a pill.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“In 1900, the average life expectancy was fifty. Now it is in the mid-eighties in industrialized nations. Clearly, the elimination of cancer and advances in regenerative medicine will push that average higher. But genetic research on aging itself promises to make even more dramatic improvements in longevity.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“For most of human history, the average person lived to age twenty-five, basically long enough to reproduce. Our average life span has been steadily on the rise, with improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and medicine, particularly the discovery of antibiotics.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“The field of regenerative medicine is in its infancy.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“The cure to cancer exists on the level of the genome.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Venter has called himself “a super enzyme” because “I catalyze things.”105 That’s probably a good description of the function hypomanics like Venter play in society.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Hypomania is the common thread that connects these world changers, a thread as invisible, as powerful, and stretching back as far in time as a strand of DNA.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Movies were the only industry to see an increase in business during the Depression.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Most of the movie moguls were Jewish immigrants who began their career as theater owners in their own neighborhood and later expanded into production.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Like many hypomanic entrepreneurs, Lewis Selznick’s problem was that “he always went too far too fast,”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“By 1920, there were 3,600,000 Jews in America, 23 percent of the world’s Jewish population. It was the greatest exodus since Moses led the Jews out of Egypt.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Human nature is harder to bend than steel, and evolution doesn’t hurry easily.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“The flow of immigrants into the United States was a “golden stream” which contributed more to her national wealth than “all the gold mines in the world.” Immigrants were America’s economic secret weapon.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Libraries were his cathedrals, a holy place to worship knowledge, hallowed buildings where the sin of ignorance was washed away and individuals could improve their station in life.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“man progressed through the “ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.”127 It was actually Spencer, and not Darwin, as most people assume, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Machines and systems that could increase efficiency were worth their weight in gold, but people who could design, run, and improve such systems were worth their weight in platinum.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Bipolar military leaders take inspired risks that seem brilliant in retrospect—if they work.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America

“Classically, most people think of mania and depression as two opposite states that alternate, but they often coexist simultaneously—a “mixed” mood state is one that combines depressive affect with manic or hypomanic impulsivity.”
― John D. Gartner, The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America