Quotes About Author

Anecdotes often represent the lowest form of persuasion.

glaring anomalies, personal opinions, emotional outbursts, or moral leanings.

In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience.

If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context.

The Red Ice icon pulses hot pink, just once, then fades to black. And he knows, in the same way the rain knows gravity, Arctic is what he's gotten himself into.

Those highlight moments forever seared in your memory: that too is group flow in action.

Like all apocalyptic writers, the author despises people in general and fantasizes about the destruction of everyone different from him and his chosen group.

Can't recognize the organization of a novel? Assume there isn't one. Baffled by arcana — i.e., stuff you don't already know? Call the author pretentious. Find a book hard-going? Assume the author is deliberately torturing you.

Vincent's reading would eventually range far beyond the books approved by his parents. But these early exposures set the trajectory. He read with demonic speed, consuming books at a breakneck pace that hardly let up until the day he died. He would start with one book by an author and then devour the entire oeuvre in a few weeks.

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise.

Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.

Poverty needs no explanation; it is the natural state of humankind. What needs an explanation is wealth.

The two deepest questions about the mind are "What makes intelligence possible?" and "What makes consciousness possible?

It's really only nuclear weapons that deserve the WMD acronym.

nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many. Again, this is not surprising, since goverments almost by definition are in the violence business.

While a vision of world peace may have given John and Yoko some good songs, it is hopelessly naïve in the real world.

And tellingly, the number of libertarian paradises in the world—developed countries without substantial social spending—is zero.

The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty.

Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment.

Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank's Knowledge Index

Vengeance is no disease: it is necessary for cooperation, preventing a nice guy from being exploited.

A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state-space.

But this book is about semantics, and I would not make a claim on your attention if I did not think that the relation of language to our inner and outer worlds was a matter of intellectual fascination and real-world importance.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud...