quotes-by-dilanka

[quotes-by-dilanka]

One of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

—Milton Friedman

#milton friedman #economics #philosophy #government #capitalism

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Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.

In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business.

You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.

Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect.

I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read.

You turn the page and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton

#michael crichton #bias #psychology #Gell-Mann Amnesia effect #amnesia #media #propaganda #writing

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Don’t kill them with kindness, Torture them with success.

―David Goggins

#david goggins #success #kindness #funny #hard work

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If I am what I have

and if I lose what I have

who then am I?

—Erich Fromm

#erich fromm #psychedelics #ego #materialism #minimalism

[quotes-by-dilanka]

I console myself with the thought that nothing very interesting happens in well-lighted places.

—Don DeLillo

#don delillo #bars #darkness #light

[quotes-by-dilanka]

You do not know where your decisions come from.

They pop up like hiccups.

And people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions.

Did I think this over long enough?

Did I take enough data into consideration?

And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration.

The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.

So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this.

Worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen.

Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision.

It is a mental wobble.

And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth...and lack a certain kind of self-confidence.

And if you see you lack self-confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling.

And if you do have self-confidence, you may get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.

You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh.

Because you see, clouds never make mistakes.

Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen?

Did you ever see a badly designed wave?

No, they always do the right thing.

But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can't make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.

Then, through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence, and through confidence, you will be able to trust your own intuition.

—Alan Watts

#philosophy #taoism #alan watts #spirituality #intuition #decisions

[quotes-by-dilanka]

"The bouncer told me I was blocking the fire exit..." "As if I wasn't gonna run if there was a fire" —Mitch Hedberg

#mitch hedberg #comedy #funny

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Psychotherapy must remain an obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.

—Artie Lange

#artie lange #psychotherapy #therapy #psychedelics

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The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

—Igor Stravinsky, Composer

#igor stravinsky #composer #thinking #philosophy #critical thinking

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Winners cannot let losers rewrite history.

—Kat Williams

#kat williams #winners #losers #history #comedian

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Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.

—Alain de Botton

#loneliness #psychology #alain de botton

[quotes-by-dilanka]

real Gs move in silence like lasagna.

—Lil Wayne, 6 foot 7

#lil wayne #lyrics #gangster #hip hop #music #mafia

[quotes-by-dilanka]

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

―Eric Hoffer

#eric hoffer #fear #military #military strategy #strategy #war

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The consummating death I show to you, that becomes for the living a spur and a promise.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

#friedrich nietzsche #thus spoke zarathustra #death

[quotes-by-dilanka]

Nostalgia is the best and worst feeling ever.

—Dilanka

#dilanka #nostalgia

[quotes-by-dilanka]

A man must consider what a blindman's-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church.

Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word?

Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing?

Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister?

He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion.

This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.

Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Meantime, nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

#ralph waldo emerson #emerson #conformity

[quotes-by-dilanka]

A linguistics professor at Harvard was lecturing his class the other day.

He said," In English, a double negative forms a positive.

However, in some other languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative.

But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

#jokes #joke #harvard #linguistics #language #comedy #funny