Quotes About World

Would a diet high in omega-3 lead to world peace?

If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work

Look around the world and you'll find overwhelming evidence of the herd mentality at work.

If morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work.

La disposición de causas y consecuencias de este mundo es tan inescrutable que un impuesto de dos peniques sobre el té, aplicado injustamente en una parte aislada, cambia la condición de todos sus habitantes.»

Economics] is all about observing the world with genuine curiosity and admitting that it is full of mysteries

impossible is just the kind of challenge we've been waiting for. What the world needs most is Superman. What the world needs most is us.

We both approach the world as economists, and as economists resigned to - and sometimes even reveling in - the character defect that diverts us from pure science to policy analysis. An economist who has abandoned his resistance to policy analysis is liable to fall prey to even more seductive and dangerous vice of policy formulation.

PARIS WAS IN AN UPROAR. IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1875 AND THE ART world was under attack by a rebellious cadre of young painters who styled themselves the Société anonyme (Anonymous Society), but whose enemies had stuck them with a range of dismissive labels including "Impressionalists," "Impressionists," and "lunatics.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened

Humans construct an understanding of the world that is very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them. They package their experience into objects and events. They assemble these objects and events into propositions, which they take to be characterisations of real and possible worlds. The characterisations are highly schematic: they pick out some aspects of a situation and ignore others, allowing the same situation to be construed in multiple ways.

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

For all the violence that remains in the world, we are living in an extraordinary age. Perhaps it is a snapshot in a progression to an even greater peace. Perhaps it is a bottoming out to a new normal, with the easy reductions all plucked and additional ones harder and harder to reach. Perhaps it is a lucky confluence of good fortune that will soon unravel. But regardless of how the trends extrapolate into the future, something remarkable has brought us to the present. One

Figure 10-1 shows that the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.

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

The whole point of international terrorism is to shock the world with the most horrific spectacle imaginable.

Today the campaign for world government lives on mainly among kooks and science fiction fans.

The information contained in a pattern depends on how coarsely or finely grained our view of the world is.

Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.

When we gaze at the world, we do not fathom the many layers of apparatus that underlie our unified visual experience, until neurological disease dissects them for us.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.