Quotes, October 2012

“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.”
-JP Morgan

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
-Albert Einstein

“People tell us who they are but we ignore it because we want them to [be] who we want them to be.”
-Don Draper

“There is often, in the course of this wayward and bewildered life, exterior opposition, and sincere and even violent condemnation, between persons and bodies who are nevertheless profoundly associated by ties and relations that they know not of.”
-William Gladstone

“We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display — language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty — and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates and gaining prestige. Instead, we rely on goods and services acquired through education, work and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others. These costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them. They prefer to judge us through natural face-to-face interaction. We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our friends and mates.”
-Geoffrey Miller

“Consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”
-Geoffrey Miller

“If no one ever seems right for you, and then the one person who does seem right doesn’t want you, then the problem isn’t the person, the problem is you.”
-The Last Psychiatrist

“Overall, I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a taxon bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge.”
-Alex Tabarrok

“Being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group: The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them.”
-Bob Sutton

“Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.”
-Josephn Campbell

“Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story.  We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death.  We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.”
-Joseph Campbell