116 quotes found
"Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware”, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind."
"These days, many philosophers give Pat credit for admonishing them that a person who wants to think seriously about the mind-body problem has to pay attention to the brain. But this acknowledgment is not always extended to Pat herself, or to the work she does now. “Although some of Churchland’s views have taken root in mainstream philosophy, she is not part of it,” Ned Block, a philosopher at New York University, wrote in a review of one of her books. “Unfortunately, Churchland . . . approaches many conceptual issues in the sciences of the mind like the more antiphilosophical of scientists.” Although she tried to ignore it, Pat was wounded by this review. But it was true; in some ways she had simply left the field. Although she often talks to scientists, she says she hasn’t got around to giving a paper to a philosophy department in five years. These days, she often feels that the philosophical debate over consciousness is more or less a waste of time."
"Neither Pat nor Paul feels much nostalgia for the old words, or the words that will soon be old. They appreciate language as an extraordinary tool, probably the most extraordinary tool ever developed. But in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, in which humans are just one animal among many, and not always the most successful one, language looks like quite a minor phenomenon, they feel. Animals don’t have language, but they are conscious of their surroundings and, sometimes, of themselves. Pat and Paul emphatically reject the idea that language and thought are, deeply, one: that the language we now use reflects thought’s innate structure; that thought can take only the form in which we humans now know it; that there could be no thought without language. Moreover, the new is the new! It is so exciting to think about revolutions in science leading to revolutions in thought, and even in what seems, to the uninitiated, to be “raw feeling,” that, by comparison, old words and old sentiments seem dull indeed."
"I’d love to know the future. Even if it’s just the past all dressed up to make whatever comes next look good."
"It's like luggage their language."
"It is not unlike men to leave."
"I told him to smother Linda with a pillow while she was sleeping. All he said was “Can’t live with ’em, can’t smother ’em with a pillow." I disagreed."
"You will definitely not survive this next bit."
"I bought a garden hose the other day. I have no idea why. I do things like that from time to time. For example, I’ll go out intending to buy cereal and come home with two Filipino hookers and an application for the Entertainment Card."
"...there is something larger that’s looming out there. A force that remains patient and silent. An entity that waits to teach a lesson that we have yet to grasp. It is much better to just lie there and let it roll over you like some immense army of unquestionable wonder."
""What made you think of Valium anyway?" I said. "I don't know. Maybe it was all that Valium that I took?" she said."
"Good morning, sunshine, time to go."
"Only killers call killing progress"
"Alert Status Red, but the sun comes up instead"
"Mother told me to be something so I'm afraid enough to stay wide awake"
"Searching for those defects, talking like it's a reflex."
"This Karma machine only takes quarters."
"Somewhere around the world someone would love to have my first world problems"
"Market Anti-Inflation Plans In such a context, it should be clear that balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief."
"WILLIAM VICKREY DIED on October 11, 1996, three days after the announcement that the 1996 Bank of Sweden prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel was being awarded to him and to Professor James Mirrlees of Cambridge “for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information.” Vickrey was eighty-two years old and had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since April 1996. The press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences refers specifically to his work in the mid-forties on income taxation, then in the early sixties on auctions. With characteristic independence, Vickrey reacted by privileging instead his work of the late thirties on cumulative averaging of income for tax purposes and his then current concern with unemployment. Early insights, lifetime dedication, and late recognition are unmistakable traits of a truly remarkable career devoted to economics in the service of the public sector."
"The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week."
"“Hell is other actors,” Kirsten said. “Also ex-boyfriends.”"
"The journalist is beautiful in the manner of people who spend an immense amount of money on personal maintenance. She has professionally refined pores and a four-hundred-dollar haircut, impeccable makeup and tastefully polished nails. When she smiles, Arthur is distracted by the unnatural whiteness of her teeth, although he’s been in Hollywood for years and should be used to it by now."
"It’s possible that no one who didn’t grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how the anonymity of city life feels like freedom."
"She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her."
"Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor."
"Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true?"
"“Why would he marry a twelve-year-old?” “He had a dream where God told him he was to repopulate the earth.” “Of course he did,” the clarinet said. “Don’t they all have dreams like that?” “Right, I always thought that was a prerequisite for being a prophet,” Sayid said."
"“They call themselves the light.” “What about it?” “If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?” “I suppose.” “If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”"
"Hell is the absence of the people you long for."
"Twenty-third Street wasn’t busy—a little early for the lunch crowd—but he kept getting trapped behind iPhone zombies, people half his age who wandered in a dream with their eyes fixed on their screens."
"“I’m a man of my word,” Jeevan said. At that point in his directionless life he wasn’t sure if this was true or not, but it was nice to think that it might be."
"Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together."
"“I just want them to know that it happened for a reason.” “Look, Tyler, some things just happen.” This close, the stillness of the ghost plane was overwhelming. “But why did they die instead of us?” the boy asked, with an air of patiently reciting a well-rehearsed argument. His gaze was unblinking. “Because they were exposed to a certain virus, and we weren’t. You can look for reasons, and god knows a few people here have driven themselves half-crazy trying, but Tyler, that’s all there is.” “What if we were saved for a different reason?” “Saved?” Clark was remembering why he didn’t talk to Tyler very often. “Some people were saved. People like us.” “What do you mean, ‘people like us’?” “People who were good,” Tyler said.”People who weren’t weak.” “Look, it’s not a question of having been bad or...the people in there, in the Air Gradia jet, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”"
"She tried to keep this opinion to herself and occasionally succeeded."
"He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret."
"Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin."
"If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness."
"This whole place is death. No, that’s unfair—this place isn’t death, this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him."
"“My secret is, I hate people,” the woman said, very sincerely, and for the first time Mirella liked her. “All people?” “All except maybe like three,” she said."
"What is time travel if not a security problem?"
"Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense."
"“You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “‘The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”"
"Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?"
"She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones."
"There occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit."
"I would rather do a dangerous job than a job that makes me comatose with boredom."
"What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself."
"It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here."
"“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said."
"My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."
"“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”"
"If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life."
"On one level, then, Cadbury can be seen as a classic example of Victorian industrial paternalism, albeit carried to greater lengths than in most other companies of the day. On another level, however, the Cadbury system resulted in a very strong, highly flexible organisation which, thanks to the strong levels of employee commitment and participation, could draw on a large bank of experience and intelligence to solve problems and undertake what amounted to continuous improvement. The employee participation system in particular meant that Cadbury was constantly upgrading its processes and products. Herbert Casson regarded Cadbury in the 1920s as one of the best-run companies in Britain, if not the world, and summed up the key to its success very succinctly: ‘At Cadbury, everybody thinks.’"
"Herbert Casson was a highly prolific writer on management, with a career as a management guru spanning some four decades. A skilled writer who was also a successful entrepreneur, he used his own experiences and acute observations of the world around him to develop a philosophy of management based on the concept of ‘efficiency’. He published more than seventy books, which by the time of his death had sold more than half a million copies around the world. Something of a maverick, he was never really accepted by the business academic community in either Britain or America. His books were popular and populist, highly entertaining and full of penetrating insight."
"Arie de Geus is a former executive with Royal Dutch/Shell who, together with Peter M. Senge, is responsible for the development of the concept of the ‘learning organisation’. In the early 1990s it was Senge, through his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline (1990), who did most to disseminate and popularise the concept. More recently, however, de Geus has produced an important body of writing in his own right, notably The Living Company (1997), in which he takes an organic and holistic view of organisations and closely links their ability to learn with the extent to which they are integrated into their environment."
"In retrospect, Mooney’s mission looks incredibly naive. It is astonishing that he could have been so close to affairs in Germany and yet not have realised the true nature of the Nazi regime; but it seems this was so. His efforts, though made in good faith, were kept secret at first, but eventually news leaked out and in the summer of 1940 PM magazine in the USA ran a series of articles accusing Mooney of Nazi sympathies and linking his meeting with Hitler to his earlier receipt of the German Order of Merit for services to industry in 1938."
"Gareth Morgan is best known as the creator of the concept of 'organisational metaphors' as a management tool. His greatest insight has been to determine that, while there is no one model of organisation that can entirely capture the essence of organisation, it is possible by means of metaphors to look at organisations from different angles and see different facets"
"I believe anyone who supports feminism is anti-woman even if they are not conscious of it. Feminism and "female empowerment" has led to a generation of the least happy women in history. They are lost and are being told that they are the EXACT same as men and should be able to compete at the same level in all fields of life. How sad to always fail at something you are supposed to be equal in. How sad to be led astray to never get married then hit a wall where you wish for nothing more than a family but cannot have it... simply because you bought into this false notion of feminism that promised happiness and fulfillment. The reality is women are biologically different and different things will make them happy."
"Excellent stuff from CPC leadership candidate @MaximeBernier There's hope for Canada!"
"Check out @MaximeBernier if you want to save Canada."
"Talking memes with @MaximeBernier"
"I am not trying to sell the idea that myself, as a 22-year-old, needs to be married right now for the sake of traditionalism and not being a degenerate. ... What is also just completely shocking to me is the utter lack of understanding of nuance and exceptions. People who ignore that there are exceptions to the rule are just as crazy as people who ignore that there’s a rule in the first place."
"and they [the boomers] definitely pranked us fiscally with debt that [we] will never be able to pay off."
""Racism is not the norm in mainstream Western culture or in its institutions: not even close to the norm."
"No, movies and TV shows are not racist."
"You can't make fun of anything anymore. Comedy is the last bastion of free speech. Let's try not to kill it."
"Who do you want to be: the spergs and savages who started wars and rubbed blood on their faces; or the reasonable gentlemen who allow the best ideas to win?"
"Even if you hate Russia and want to see it nuked or levelled today, you still need to understand your enemy. You need to understand how they think in order to compete with them."
"[About Aleksandr Dugin:] There are so many people who call him a fascist and it triggers me so much because that just tells me they're talking about Dugin when they haven't even read the first three pages of his book. He hates fascism."
"[About the Russian invasion of Ukraine 2022:] It's a more complex issue that just 'Russian big baddie', 'West big good guy'. Do I think invading Ukraine is a good thing? No, of course not. I hate having to always put these stipulations before everything I say when I have a conversation. Of course what they are doing is bad but we still need to consider the good parts of their ideology and the good critiques they have, because if we have no self-criticizm as the West as a liberal society, we're going to become exactly what they expect us to do: Some culture that just becomes Unicron and tries to eat the rest of the world and never self-reflects."
"I think it's terrifying that we're banning all of this Russian media, because we're gonna get one story and it's going to be completely different from what the other half of the world hears. You're going to have the Western story and view of reality, and the [Eastern-Eurasian] story and view of reality. And we're going to have completely different world views to a terrifying extent. [...] We cannot operate in a world with only 50 percent of the story. We're gonna all become little North Koreas [...]."
"[The terrifying thing] is that most of the people commenting on this Ukraine crisis couldn't even point Ukraine on a map a month ago. They have no idea of any of the history. They look at it from a cartoon world view: Putin is just bad, and he's bad because he's bad, of course, and if you disagree with that then you're bad."
"I saw the other day, it was horrific, they had Russian soldiers in Red Square going through and asking people to see what was on their phone and saying 'We're going to arrest you if you don't show us what's on your phone. [...] Because we need to see if you're posting pro-Ukraine stuff.' Horrific. Unfortunately this happens in the West as well, just people can't see it publically yet."
"I think it's fantastic that Twitter has come out and put a little thing that says 'Russian state affiliated media' behind RT. I think it's fantastic that they put 'Chinese state affiliated media' behind that. Now where the hell is the BBC, CBC and all of the Western ones? Why do we not show that our states fund media as well? [...] We all have the exact same temptation to appeal to where our checks come from."
"I think this is the problem when everything is down to your property, your banking. All of that is so centralized in government hands and control. People know they have nothing they can do, especially when you have a kid. When you have a kid [...] they will have you by the throat. There is nothing you can do. Because any decision you make to try to stand up to what you feel is oppressive horrible government policy is going to affect your child [...] so you're putting them at risk."
"[About her reputation:] [I think] that there is a bit of an unfair retrospect going on here where at that time it was way more controversial to say the things that I was saying than it is now. And if I had waited five years, I don't think I would have had the reputation that I have today whatsoever."
"You have to have a real love of your sport to carry you through all the bad times."
"I think the party owes their membership an explanation. And furthermore, I think that the party owes Mr. Scheer an explanation … his potential credibility is damaged because of this. They should explain to him how this happened and how it will never happen again. He should be insisting upon a more thorough review of what happened."
"Our apologies to Jay Hill that he never received his ballot in the mail. Our records show we mailed him a ballot on April 21, and a replacement ballot after we heard from him, and we sincerely regret that it did not arrive"
"Realize the response of the parish is based on the response of Jesus Christ, who always to the lonely, the elderly, and even those were deceased."
"For many Faithful of the UCC in the diaspora the Church is regarded as a protector of political aspirations and the dreams of the Ukrainian People. For others, the Church is a centre for Ukrainian culture and language. For others yet, the Church is a display for the artistic life: where the church building becomes an end in itself."
"If you are in the Sumas Prairie and have not already evacuated, you must do so immediately. Do not stay for livestock or property. Flood conditions have escalated quickly and pose a significant risk to life . This event is anticipated to be catastrophic. Residents who cannot evacuate safely are asked to call 911 and report your location immediately."
"I have also been in contact with Bill Blair, federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness, to request federal assistance on this incident and the flooding situation in general. This includes Canadian Armed Forces ground and air support"
"The impact of this find was devastating. It’s hard to overstate the effects and impact it’s had on our nation. It’s triggered so many hurts and wounds. We have a lot of grieving members right now."
"We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify."
"Today is about making some positive steps forward and rectifying a mistake. We wanted to ensure that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited what we refer to as a sacred site. It was a long awaited moment to receive a personal hand of recognition and sympathy regarding this horrific confirmation of unmarked graves from the Canadian head of state."
"“She reached out, she said ‘please come, listen and learn and we will walk this path together and that is why I’m here,’” he [Justin Trudeau] said."
"Rustad rebate (The largest tax cut on housing in BC history. $3,000 per month of rent or mortgage will be exempt from provincial income taxes.)"
"“Digital Asset has evolved from an ambitious idea to a truly global software engineering firm. We are fortunate to have a deep bench of accomplished executives on the management team and board, including AG [Gangadhar], who have the requisite experience to take the company to the next level. Having come to know and trust AG as an advisor and board member, I am convinced that he brings what’s needed to guide the company through its next phase.”"
"“What in the long run this all meant was that credit, which is a vital part of the lifeblood of any economy, the global economy, became a more readily available asset""
"“And the thinking was that that would be an unambiguously positive thing.”"
"“Unfortunately, tools that transfer risk can also increase systemic risk if major counterparties fail to manage their own risk exposures properly,”"
"There is some crazy pressure on women, and on men, to almost be superwoman or superman, and that's just not realistic"
"The advice to everyone is, you can have it all, but don't expect to have it at exactly the same time"
"Your career is going to be measured in decades, and you'll probably have many careers in your life, so make sure that you really enjoy each period of your life and make the most of it"
"Don't try and achieve everything at the same time and put so much pressure on yourself"
"That was a game-changing piece of advice for me, because then I started doing completely different jobs and ones that weren't necessarily logical to most people's thinking"
"That philosophy very much guided me to start thinking what are the things that would equip me better for a more senior role further down the path"
"If we didn't put our people's health and safety first ... I think we would have done a very poor job managing the bank"
"We've been in the midsts of a health crisis, and if we didn't put our people's health and safety first and understand what's going on in their lives, honestly, I think we would have done a very poor job managing the bank through the crisis"
"Our employees have then rewarded us incredibly because, secure in that and knowing that they were going to be okay, then meant that they would focus on our clients and look after them too"
"We will invest in our infrastructure, risk management and controls to ensure that we operate in a safe and sound manner and serve our clients and customers with excellence"
"I knew it was going to be multiple years and I knew I had to get a move on: to be bold around it and take tough decisions that hadn’t been made before, and to make investments that were going to be hard for the bottom line for a couple of years but would then bear fruit"
"Having experience of different parts of the bank gives you a lot of courage and conviction, to get clarity quickly about what needs to be done and stick to the plan, even if it’s difficult"
"Our folk here are not shy about telling you what you need to do when you ask them"
"We are not done and we’ve still got a way to go. There is no victory being declared, but there is very clear, demonstrable progress"
"There was a lot of pride in some of these retail businesses and it has been hard to let go of them from a cultural point of view"
"We’ve taken some pretty tough talent calls, says Fraser. If someone was a strong performer, but their job had gone away in the reorg, we would put them into a job that someone else had"
"We are using the strength of our global platform, and what we do in Services and other areas, to propel the relationship into the boardroom"
"That’s expensive and thankless work until it’s done, and then it’s joyful"
"If you move from 20 different ways of doing something to one, that reduces the risk of something going wrong enormously. Then you make sure that the process around that makes sense, end to end: making sure it isn’t convoluted and complex. You put in all your controls, both preventive, and detective. You try and make as many of them automated as possible, and then you test them constantly to make sure they’re working. That is the deeply unsexy but very important work we have been doing"
"There are a lot more things coming off the to-do list than getting added to it. We can see it delivering better outcomes and starting to improve efficiency. There’s been a huge lift done, but now we’re in the phase when you’re starting to get things closed"
"As an 'allocated Canadian' (for the National Women's Soccer League) I got to list three cities that I wanted to play in and no joke I wrote 'Portland, Portland, Portland'."
"I really don’t think about scoring, but instead think more about being dangerous."
"She has that special quality that I cannot teach; she is just there and knocks the ball in with head, chest, or foot."