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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“If India is an emerging economy with millions of new consumers, sell them the Volvo. Sell them the Cielo car. Sell them whatever you can, hamburgers and KFCs. It’s the middle classes who have moved into being able to own a car, a refrigerator. For them there is this mantra that the General Electric refrigerator is better than some other model, that the Cielo car is fancier than the Ambassador.”

“If Indian weddings for Indian people are the furthest from “fun,” trips to India for Indian people are the furthest from “vacation.” When I told my friends about the upcoming trip, everyone purred about what a great time I’d have, told me to take a lot of photos, told me to eat everything. But if you’re going to India to see your family, you’re not going to relax, you’re not going to have a nice time. No, you’re going so you can touch the very last of your bloodline, to say hello to the new ones and goodbye to the older ones, since who knows when you’ll visit again. You are working.”

“If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.”

“If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. . . . Love and sex do indeed go together.”

“If insolvency is not transparent or well understood, and if illiquidity is backstopped by the Federal Reserve, then why do bank runs commence? The answer is psychology. Some customers or counterparties come to believe a bank will not repay them so they pull their money out or close transactions as quickly as possible. They are not reassured by ... press releases or positive comments by management. Word spreads, the withdrawals accelerate, and within days, sometimes hours, the bank closes its doors. From there it's an open issue whether the lost confidence spreads to other banks, in a process called contagion. No amount of capital or comment can stop a bank panic; it has a life of its own. ... Enter AI. The next bank run may be triggered not by human panic but by AI imitating human panic. An AI bank analysis program with deeply layered neural networks and machine learning capability (perhaps complimented by a GPT capacity to speak with human analysts) Could read millions of pages of financial data on thousands of individual banks, far more than any team of human analysts could review. It's training set of materials provides familiarity with the dynamics of bank runs, basically an emerging property of a complex dynamic system, along with historical examples, worst case scenarios, and defensive moves. Events like the gold corner of 1869, the panic of 1907, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the S&L crisis of the 1980s would all seem as fresh as today's news. This system would reach the same conclusion as a human analyst — move first, get your money out fast, don't be the last in line. The true danger is not that the machine thinks like a human — it's supposed to. The danger is that it can act faster and communicate with other machines.”

“If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.”

“If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.”

“If instead of looking at income, you look at levels of consumption, if anything that's become more equal. The fraction of families that have a dishwasher, that have a sewing machine, that have a television set. In respect to consumption, it's very hard to avoid the view that people have been getting more equal rather than more unequal.”

“If, instead of Wainwright's question, we ask 'What were the Picts?', the answer is very simple. They were a nation created by the union of a number of tribes. This union, formed initially as a military alliance against the common enemy, stood the test of time and long outlived the Roman invasion. For the last seventeen centuries the peoples of this union have been known collectively as the Picts, a name first recorded by the Romans. The name itself is a familiar part of the problem: did Picti really mean 'the painted men, or was it simply the Latin form of a long-forgotten native name? Puting this question on one side for the moment, we might refer to the Picts as 'The United Tribes of Caledonia', or UTC for short, a name which tells us just what they really were.”

“If instead policy makers and program managers participate in an interdisciplinary assessment team, make informal visits to local families and have in-depth conversations with local providers and health authorities, the real needs and complex challenges of organizing good reproductive health services become apparent.The first country that implemented this participatory program of assessment, research and policy development was Brazil. I was one of the outsiders who provided support to the initiative.”