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Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.
A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do in order to achieve what they want to achieve.
I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.
I am asking myself what is fear: not what I am afraid of. I lead a certain kind of life; I think in a certain pattern; I have certain beliefs and dogmas and I don't want those patterns of existence to be disturbed because I have my roots in them. I don't want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state of unknowing and I dislike that. If I am torn away from everything I know and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of things to which I am going. So the brain cells have created a pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which may be uncertain. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.
Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that.
The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.
We must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Poverty becomes a marvellously beautiful thing when the mind is free of society. One must become poor inwardly for then there is no seeking, no asking, no desire, no - nothing! It is only this inward poverty that can see the truth of a life in which there is no conflict at all.
An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
The bad sort of vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you're not.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads. 
BUREAUCRAT: A person who cuts red tape sideways.
The individual has to awaken his intelligence, not through any form of discipline, resistance, compulsion, coercion, but through freedom.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. 
To be interested in the public good we must be disinterested, that is, not interested in goods in which our personal selves are wrapped up.
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.
We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable?
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
He had a photographic memory which was never developed.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!
George Bush says he speaks to god every day, & Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.
Other broader aspects of the attempt to seek safety and stability in the world are seen in the very common preference for familiar rather than unfamiliar things, or for the known rather than the unknown. The tendency to have some religion or world-philosophy that organizes the universe and the men in it into some sort of satisfactorily coherent, meaningful whole is also in part motivated by safety-seeking. Here too we may list science and philosophy in general as partially motivated by the safety needs....
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have either a clear conscience, or none at all.
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
We argue so much today about 'democracy' versus 'totalitarianism'. Democracy presupposes intelligence of the masses;* totalitarianism does not to the same degree. But a 'democracy' without intelligence of the masses under modern conditions can be a worse human mess than any dictatorship could be.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
Follow the three R's: - Respect for self. - Respect for others. - Responsibility for all your actions.
No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.
If you want a real meaning, and you can’t find one, it’s all very well to make one up — but I don’t see how that solves any problems. ... Unless you say how God works, saying that God exists doesn’t explain anything.
Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules. The computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon fleshed this idea out further by noting that intelligence consists of specifying a goal, assessing the current situation to see how it differs from the goal, and applying a set of operations that reduce the difference. Perhaps reassuringly, by this definition human beings, not just aliens, are intelligent. We have desires, and we pursue them using beliefs, which, when all goes well, are at least approximately or probabilistically true.
I didn’t plan to become an atheist. I didn’t even want to become an atheist. It’s just that I had no choice. If I’m being honest with myself.
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
People prefer bad company to solitude and anything to one's own company.
If you analyze well your most poetic impressions and imaginings -- the ones that most exalt you and pull you outside of yourself and of the real world -- you would find that they and the pleasure they cause (at least after childhood) consist totally or chiefly in remembrance.
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
The important thing is first to find out what you are afraid of, to understand it and not run away from it.
Never give up. No matter what is happening, no matter what is going on around you, never give up.
Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.
Here appear to exist general system laws which apply to any system of a particular type, irrespective of the particular properties of the systems and the elements involved. Compared to the analytical procedure of classical science with resolution into component elements and one-way or linear causality as basic category, the investigation of organized wholes of many variables requires new categories of interaction, transaction, organization, teleology.
Most books are about aspects of human knowledge. Few people write books about human ignorance, despite the fact that there would be much more to write about.
The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.
To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.
Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.
Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.
Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.
Biology is Engineering.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
There are so many attention whores out there, prostituting for people's acknowledgment.
Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.
The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do.
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
Ultimately, fear of failure generates a vicious circle that creates what is most feared. To break this cycle, you need to make peace with failure. It isn't enough to merely tolerate it; you need to appreciate the failure and use it ...
Asking 'Who ought to be the boss?' is like asking 'Who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?' Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.
The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life.
Don't compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
Of necessity, the autobiographical self is not just about one individual but about all the others that an individual interacts with. Of necessity, it incorporates the culture in which the interactions took place.
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God.
Modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field. Thus science is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new subdisciplines. In consequence, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist and the social scientist are, so to speak, encapusulated in their private universes, and it is difficult to get word from one cocoon to the other.
I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.
If we agree on everything, only one of us is necessary.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005), they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. . . . Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
It’s a good thing we have gravity or else when birds died they’d just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused.
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.
Teaching is not the mere imparting of knowledge but the cultivation of an inquiring mind.
The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. 
The aim of development must be neither producerism not consumerism, but the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, which are not only needs of humanity.
Science, however, is not just a matter of making mistakes, but of making mistakes in public. Making mistakes for all to see, in the hopes of getting the others to help with the corrections.
The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.
As a man believes, so he will act.
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