People From Chicago

"“Oh! This isn’t possible. You’re dead.” “So are you, but we’re not going to let that get in our way.”"

"“Besides, prophecies are tricky stuff. It’s only after that people recognize them as important. At the time they’re spoken most people don’t want to hear about them.” “Really? But aren’t they truth?” “Especially then. Truth is tough.” “Why? I mean, it’s the truth. It just is.” “I think that’s so, in the abstract, but none of us get to really know the abstract. We only know what we think.”"

"I’m dead, Jorl. You can’t tell me what to do."

"I mean, sure, like all prophecy the wording is vague."

"She hated politics and she had no patience for the ultra-serious, wide-eyed dreamers who wanted to change your world whether you wanted to live with those changes or not."

"In 1998, I had a talk with a friend that was vegetarian, and he just made me think … Like, just because someone else can kill an animal for you and cut it up and do all the disgusting dirty work, all I have to do is walk into McDonald’s and order it and then I can eat it. … I still eat the same kinds of things I used to but without meat. So I think that if you love animals and deep down are sort of just over [eating them] or think it’s wrong and not the right thing to do, then just stop doing it. … Videos are also very effective—my friend saw a video about factory farming and stopped eating meat immediately afterward. Seeing is believing. Sometimes people don’t want to think about stuff like that or don’t care to think about stuff like that until it’s really just thrown in their face."

"I want to build this business as long as the customers will keep eating my sandwiches."

"That song [5-3-10-4 from '] really is about how I saw things. I wrote that song when I was still doing the bike messenger grind and you know being down by the stockyards where they would take all the animals and slaughter them; there were a bunch of slaughterhouses down there and there were cows and pigs being frozen and chunks of meat were hanging in trucks, it was such a pinnacle time in my life. … I haven’t eaten meat for something like 17 years. I remember I was eating meat one day and my cat was looking up at me and I thought, ‘Man I wouldn’t eat my cat. What difference would it make if it was a little cat or a cow?’ and it occurred to me that we are all connected and I didn’t want to contribute to that. All the time people around me are eating meat but that is their thing, it is not until they ask that I inform them that I am a vegetarian and it is a big part of who I am."

"I've been around for 32 years and nobody knows who we are."

"I was pretty much raised in an entirely vegetarian household. I wasn't aware that there was a whole community of vegetarians out there. There was a point where I said, "I want to understand the other side of this situation," and I ate meat for maybe three years. Then right around the time that I phased meat out and became vegetarian, I recognized that I was lactose intolerant. So again, I was completely naïve to the fact that there was a thing called veganism. After a few years, I started going to a lot of hardcore shows where everybody was and vegan. That was when I found out that there were other people that were like-minded."

"It wasn’t a great location. I started to deliver, not because it was part of a business plan, but to get sales—to make up for my C location."

"I changed the rules for allowing people to buy into my system as a franchisee. I explained in detail how tough running a Jimmy John's can be. I explained the long hours, the unforgiving weather, the late nights, the weekends, and all of the sacrifices that go along with the industry."

"If you serve the business, it will serve you. Serve the business, serve the team."

"I was at this fancy school and I felt out of place, so I rebelled. But Jim Lyons put his arm around me. He cared about me."

"I graduated second to last in my class. I was a fat kid. I was bullied by others."

"Gullible citizens are a demagogue’s dream."

"Even the most superficial of a newspaper reveals an important aspect of human psychology: our preoccupation with the short term."

"When the law’s on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. And when neither is on your side, pound the table."

"Rigid distinctions between the deep and the shallow are generally themselves quite superficial."

"The fashion pages have always puzzled me. In my smugly ignorant view, the articles appear to be so full of fluff and nonsense as to make the astrology columns seem insightful by comparison."

"Two dangers threaten the world—order and disorder."

"It’s time to let the secret out: mathematics is not primarily a matter of plugging numbers into formulas and performing rote computations. It is a way of thinking and questioning that may be unfamiliar to many of us, but is available to almost all of us."

"You can only predict things after they’ve happened."

"Our two most basic political ideals—liberty and equality—are, in their purest forms, incompatible. Complete liberty results in inequality, and mandatory equality leads to a loss of liberty."

"If we’re not keenly aware of the choices we’re making, we’re not likely to work for better ones."

"Too often, this concern for the big picture is simply obscurantist and is put forward by people who prefer vagueness and mystery to (partial) answers. Vagueness is at times necessary and mystery is never in short supply, but I don’t think they’re anything to worship. Genuine science and mathematical precision are more intriguing than are the “facts” published in supermarket tabloids or a romantic innumeracy which fosters credulity, stunts skepticism, and dulls one to real imponderables."

"Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most."

"There is no such thing as free lunch, and even if there were, there’d be no guarantee against indigestion."

"Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify."

"While not a panacea, candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God’s existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a humane, reasonable, and brave outlook just might help move this world a bit closer to a heaven on earth."

"The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign."

"It’s always healthy to recognize facts."

"For the record, natural selection is a highly nonrandom process that acts on the genetic variation produced by random mutation and genetic drift and results in those organisms with more adaptive traits differentially surviving and reproducing."

"You would think that the obvious irreligious objection would come to almost anyone’s mind when reading a religious tome or holy book. What if you don’t believe the holy book’s presuppositions and narrative claims and simply ask for independent argument or evidence for God’s existence? What if you’re not persuaded by the argument that God exists because His assertion that He exists and discussion of His various exploits appear in this book about Him that believers say He inspired?"

"Always be smart; seldom be certain."

"I’ve argued that the set of standard questions journalists ask and readers want answers should be enlarged. Besides Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, it should include How many? How likely? What fraction? How does the quantity compare with other quantities? What is its rate of growth, and how does that compare? What about the self-referential aspects of the story? Is there an appropriate degree of complexity in it? Are we looking at the right categories and relations? How much of the story is independent of its reporting? Are we especially vulnerable to the availability error or to anchoring effects? If statistics are presented, how were they obtained? How confident can we be of them? Were they derived from a random sample or from a collection of anecdotes? Does the correlation suggest a causal relationship, or is it merely a coincidence? And do we understand how the people and various pieces of an organization reported upon are connected? What is known about the dynamics of the whole system? Are they stable or do they seem sensitive to tiny perturbations? Are there other ways to tally any figures presented? Do such figures measure what they purport to measure? Is the precision recounted meaningful?"

"Any bit of nonsense can be computerized—astrology, biorhythms, the I Ching—but that doesn’t make the nonsense any more valid."

"Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them."

"There is a fine line between public expressions of faith and aggressive declarations thereof, and religious tolerance is inversely proportional to the latter."

"Almost any bunkum has some partial validity, and we regularly read into the confusing mess what we want to see."

"One can and should debate whether the tests in question are appropriate for the purposes at hand, but one shouldn’t be surprised when normal curves behave normally."

"There are, of course, innumerable abuses, countless possible misinterpretations, and depressingly many biased studies, but, done right, the process works; it yields knowledge."

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?"

"I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not."

"The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place."

"There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe."

"There surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability."

"A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence."

"To follow foolish precedents, and wink with both eyes, is easier than to think."