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Quote by R.F. Kuang

“Have you ever considered you might better make your point by being nice?' 'Nice comes from the Latin word for "stupid",' said Griffin. 'We don't wanna be nice.”

Quote by R.F. Kuang

Book:Babel
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Babel

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R.F. Kuang

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“When you're alone, keep an eye on your thoughts—they tend to throw wild parties when unsupervised. When you're successful, watch your ego—nobody likes a braggart with a ballooned head. Got problems? Keep your emotions in check—meltdowns are best reserved for ice cream. And when you're in a crowd, mind your words—foot-in-mouth syndrome is real and highly contagious. Master these, and you'll navigate life like a pro, with a grin and a clever retort always at the ready.”

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Author:Life is Positive
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“People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error.”

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Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
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“The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.”

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Book:The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
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