Authors From The United States

"The time seems simpler than today, but mostly because the past always seems simpler when its wars are done."

"I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes."

"Nouns and verbs carry writing."

"At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better."

"The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon."

"In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer."

"The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do."

"I wonder if anyone always knows-you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost-that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew?"

"When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home."

"One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all."

"No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day."

"It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent."

"Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory."

"What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game."

"The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat."

"He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again."

"Calendar Reform is the final act of history, and the first step toward Earth Regeneration in the cradle of galactic culture."

"The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated."

"The outline of our lives, like the candles flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate."

"After my two attempts at gently raising the issue of string theory, one afternoon I stepped into Feynman's office to ask him what he really thought."Can we talk a little about string theory?" I asked. … "Don't you think there are aspects of it that seem very promising?""Promising? What does it promise? Does it promise to tell you the mass of the proton? No. What does it promise to tell you?""Well, no one knows how to extract any quantitative predictions yet, but—""You're wrong. It does make a quantitative prediction. Do you know what that is?"I looked at him. My mind was a blank."It requires that we live in ten dimensions. Is it reasonable to have a theory that requires ten dimensions? No. Do we see those dimensions? No. So it rolls them up into tiny balls or cylinders too small to detect. So the only prediction it makes is one that has to be explained away because it doesn't fit with observation.""

"Random events often come like the raisins in a box of cereal - in groups, streaks, and clusters. And although Fortune is fair in potentialities, she is not fair in outcomes."

"The theory of randomness is fundamentally a codification of common sense."

"The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment."

"What I have learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized."

"Obviously it can be a mistake to assign brilliance in proportion to wealth. We cannot see a persons potential, only his or her results, so we often misjudge people by thinking that the results must reflect the person. The normal accident theory of life shows not that the connection between actions and rewards is random but that random influences are as important as our qualities and actions."

"Even random differences in pay lead to the backward inference of differences in skill and hence to the development of unequal influence. It's an element of personal and office dynamics that can't be ignored."

"We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom."

"It might seem daunting to think that effort and chance, as much as innate talent, are what counts. But I find it encouraging because, while our genetic makeup is out of our control, our degree of effort is up to us. And the effects of chance, too, can be controlled to the extent that by committing ourselves to repeated attempts, we can increase our odds of success."

"Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal."

"It is one of those contradictions of life that although measurement always carries uncertainty, the uncertainty in measurement is rarely discussed."

"We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must reflect unique qualities not shared by those forced to eat commercial airline food. And we place too much confidence in the overly precise predictions of people - political pundits, financial experts, business consultants - who claim a track record demonstrating expertise."

"Comets at the time were considered by theologians and the general public alike as a sign of divine anger, and God must have seemed pretty pissed off to create this one - it occupied more than half of the visible sky."

"Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on."

"The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large."

"Another lottery mystery that raised many eyebrows occurred in Germany on June 21, 1995. The freak event happened in a lottery called Lotto 6/49, which means that the winning six numbers are drawn from 1 to 49. On the day in question the winning numbers were 15-25-27-30-42-48. The very same sequence had been drawn previously, on December 20, 1986. It was the first time in 3,016 drawings that a winning sequence had been repeated. What were the chances of that? Not as bad as you'd think. When you do the math, the chance of a repeat at some point over the years comes out to around 28 percent."

"Whether the queen caused the period, or the period creates the queen, she fitted her time perfectly."

"The Dodgson family worshipped the God of Love, who showed his stern face only in the presence of evil."

"Dodgson of course was a meticulous traveler. He packed each article separately, well wrapped in paper to twice its bulk."

"How did it happen that the Reverend Charles Dodgson, thirty years of age, lecturer on geometry at Christ Church, Oxford, hitherto remarkable chiefly for his precision, on a single July afternoon, while rowing up the Isis with a brother don and three little girls, parthenogenetically gave birth to one of the most famous stories of all time?"

"Charles Dodgson, born a romantic and a rationalist, would have fitted more easily into the world of Voltaire and Goethe than into the one that received him."

"(Carmine Crocco) From having once been a peaceful shepherd, [he] had become the terror of southern Italy. [...] The usual occupation of Crocco's band was robbery of the wealthy Italians of the vicinity, battles with the Italian troops, and the seizure and robbery of rich foreigners, for whose deliverance heavy ransoms were demanded. When a detachment of troops was sent against them, they showed considerable courage. As they knew the country well, with its hiding-places and points of vantage, it was not easy to capture them."

"(Carmine Crocco) The so-called "General" Crocco, who played an important part as a brigand and Bourbonist leader in the partisan war of 1860-61, was an escaped convict, with thirty offences, ranging from petty larceny to murder, registered against him in the books of the Neapolitan tribunals. He pillaged both Bourbonists and Liberals with strict impartiality."

"Work is the antonym of free time. But not of leisure. Leisure and free time live in two different worlds. We have got into the habit of thinking them the same. Anybody can have free time. Free time is a realizable idea of democracy. Leisure is not fully realizable, and hence an ideal not alone an idea. Free time refers to a special way of calculating a special kind of time. Leisure refers to a state of being, a condition of man, which few desire and fewer achieve."

"If you're given to using "like" as a filler word, then by all means, like, have at it. Filler words are rhetorical lubricant."

"Most Americans are bilingual and don’t even know it. Because in addition to their native language, they learn at an early age (as did I) to speak “Cliché.” So instead of “acquaint yourself with,” they’ll insist on the more common expression “get to know.” Instead of “think no more of it,” they’ll dumb that down to the insufferable “fuhget about it.” Multiply those two examples by a thousand, and you’ve got yourself a terribly bad case of UAD: ugly American diction."

"Listening is ninety percent of effective speaking - and most of the remaining ten percent of the time should be spent thinking with one's mouth closed."

"Soon, when AI has mastered the art of brilliant writing, conversational speech will come to be known as the only form of communication fully trusted as authentically human and the only real proof of one's eloquence, such that those who can assuredly speak will be held in a higher regard than those who can supposedly write."

"American Democracy: If you've never gotten a death threat, you're not doing it right."

"Words are like little gods; to forsake their power is to forsake yours."

"Dark blue journalism is going to get a lot of people killed if it delivers the Electoral College to MAGA in November. And the violence won’t start with Seal Team Six knocking on Rachel Maddow’s door. Instead, Trump will follow his Russian mentor’s playbook by giving all the Proud Boys out there the only thing they need - a wink and a nod. These are the kinds of people who would drag a 14-month-old puppy to a gravel pit and blow its brains out for Christ’s sake. These are the kinds of people who would murder 100,000 Ukrainians just to make Russia’s coin-operated grocery carts great again."