Quotessence
Home / Books / Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

Book by Barbara Ehrenreich · 3 quotes · Positive Thinking, Thinking, Cancer

Filter quotes by topic

AllPositive ThinkingThinkingCancerWorldBreast CancerDiseaseDoeHas BeensHumansMayPsychologyShouldStatesUnderstandingWellsWishful ThinkingAccidentsAlgorithmsAnxiousAssuming

Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America Quotes

“At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.”

WorldHumansHas BeensHardIndividualGivenTechnologyIssuesDependsProtectSurvivalCommitmentAssumingSpeciesFloatsRelentlessPierceReassuranceOmenEmpiricismKnowledge Of The WorldBison
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Create image

“The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”

WorldShouldSaidRealDoneMightUnderstandingNaturalOneselfWhy NotAnxiousReach OutSolidarityPeersIntrospectionRetreatNatural WorldReal WorkWork To Be DoneUnderstanding Why
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Create image

“Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

WorldWayHumansLongHas BeensFeelingsCausesUnderstandingChanceResultsEmotionStruggleProgressSkyEffectsDivineDiseaseIntellectualEnlightenmentRegardAccidentsPunishmentProbabilityThunderProjectionWitchcraftUnfoldingCause And EffectAlgorithmsFingernailsTantrums
Book:Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Create image