Quotes About Impact

If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years' time. He was right almost to the exact year.

you don't need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems [are], and know about creative confrontation—to create drama around it, to begin the consciousness-raising…. You capture people's attention, and then enough people feel that it's a vital issue that they want to give their time and their energy [to], and that there's a clear direction.

Professor Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University has shown that the murder rate has dramatically increased twice in U.S. history—and both times were during periods when prohibition was dramatically stepped up. The first is from 1920 to 1933, when alcohol was criminalized. The second is from 1970 to 1990, when the prohibition of drugs was dramatically escalated.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level

It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.

One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn't mean it's good for humanity.

If it's more enraging, it's more engaging. If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. As Tristan told me, that turns hate into a habit.

Curiously, it turned out emotional abuse was more likely12 to cause depression than any other kind of trauma—even sexual molestation. Being treated cruelly by your parents was the biggest driver of depression, out of all these categories.

The worst stress for people isn't having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is, he told me, having to endure "work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.

Have I done aught of value to my fellow-men? Then have I done much for myself

He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius or a hero.

Es ist natürlich wenn uns ein Unglück, oder etwas Schreckliches im Vergnügen überrascht, dass es stärkere Eindrücke auf uns macht als sonst, teils wegen des Gegensatzes, der sich so lebhaft empfinden lässt, teils und noch mehr, weil unsere Sinne einmal der Fühlbarkeit geöffnet sind und also desto schneller einen Eindruck annehmen.

A useless life is only an early death

The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinions of its young men under five-and-twenty

The destiny of any nation at any given time depends on the opinion of its young people, those under twenty-five.

If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much.

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.

One mind is enough for a thousand hands.

It seems it has been my fate to sadden those I should have made happy.

Part of that power which would Do evil constantly and constantly does good.

Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do.