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All I Quotes

“In both the old and the new quarters a pitch of foulness and filth was reached that the lowest serf's cottage scarcely achieved in medieval Europe. It is almost impossible to enumerate objectively the bare details of this housing without being suspected of perverse exaggeration. But those who speak glibly of urban improvements during this period, or of the alleged rise in the standards of living, fight shy of the actual facts: they generously impute to the town as a whole benefits which only the more favored middle-class minority enjoyed; and they read into the original conditions those improvements which three generations of active legislation and massive sanitary engineering have finally brought about.”

“In both the public and the private sectors, one can find people who are altruistic, selfish, smart, stupid, capable, incompetent, and just about every other description. They are all drawn from the same mass of people in roughly the same proportions. What is true of all of these people is that they pursue what they believe will make them happy, and they respond to the incentives that surround them. When those incentives are tied directly to their job performance, people’s quest for happiness encourages them to behave in ways that satisfy the people for whom they perform their jobs. But when people’s incentives are tied to something else, like voters avoiding the cost of becoming informed, or politicians attracting more voters, or bureaucrats making their jobs less difficult, the outcomes that emerge can be very different from the outcomes people had in mind when they empowered government to pursue those outcomes in the first place. Consider the typical experiences with the Post Office versus FedEx, Amtrak versus Southwest, applying for a driver’s license versus applying for a credit card, or applying for federal financial aid versus applying for a bank loan.”

“In boxing, where most of the guys are from lower-class backgrounds and have darker skin than most of the fans, one might fear that the athletes are being exploited. But that narrative doesn't hold up very well in the world of MMA, where 99 percent of fighters are amateurs who will never earn a dime. They aren't seeking fame and fortune. For the most part, these guys are fighting because they want to and because it gives them an opportunity to strive for something big in their lives. It gives them a chance to become their best selves.”

“In Brazil, every road, bridge and viaduct has been given a name, usually that of some long-forgotten personage who was once famous for doing something worthy. Honestly, every one of them; deeper into the country, I’ve even found unsurfaced dirt tracks given names. I’m never likely to have even five minutes of fame, but if I did, I don’t think I’d want to be remembered by a dirt track going from Nowhere Town to Obscure Village.”

“In Brazil, even inside the same city, people from different parts dress differently. Sao Paulo, for example, is more connected to global trends and urban movements. Rio de Janeiro is more influenced by the beach, and has a sort of Cali vibe with the way people dress. Porto Alegre down in the south has a hard winter, so people have to dress to face the cold days.”

“In Brazil, there is a fear and a denial of our past. Downtown Rio used to display the history of colonialism in Brazil. They had beautiful buildings and theaters, and there was a bakery that was threatened to be demolished, but people insisted against it. They laid down in front of it and said, "You're going to have to go over my body to destroy it." It frustrates me when I see people on Facebook posing in front of old buildings while on vacation, because they could've posed in front of equally beautiful buildings at home in Rio.”

“In brief, anyone who has worked at one or two workplaces in America is familiar with that type of middle management or upper management individuals whose job is almost exclusively to create unnecessary tasks and procedures that turn the lives of employees under them into an absolute nightmare. What usually happens under such toxic circumstances? Nothing. A deafening silence from most employees. In fact, many employees not only remain silent out of fear of getting fired, they go as far as putting on fake smiles (or even loud laughter) to survive. Some walk around the office with the attitude of ‘I love my job!’ ‘I love my life!’ ‘I am living the dream!’ to please middle and upper management.”

“In brief, if we are biological organisms, not angels, much of what we seek to understand might lie beyond our cognitive limits – maybe a true understanding of anything, as Galileo concluded, and Newton in a certain way demonstrated. That cognitive reach has limits is not only a truism but also a fortunate one; if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope: we could achieve nothing by inquiry.”

“In brief, if we do not seriously problematize diversity as practiced currently in our society, we all lose. The diverse people should take this more seriously than anyone else, because putting them at the forefront of the battlefield with low-paid jobs while making them look like they are 'stealing' someone else’s job opportunities is not worth the paychecks they are getting in the long run. It is no secret that this hoax of diversity has turned countless poor and marginalized White Americans into the biggest enemies of diversity in America. This negatively affects all diverse people who truly love and make important contributions to the American society.”

“In brief, supervision entails several elements: developing the supervisee’s professional skills, supervisee gaining in self-awareness, protecting the client, and mentoring and evaluating the supervisee’s services to clients. These elements are fostered within a learning alliance between supervisor and supervisee[.]”

“In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils, as rapidly and as painlessly as possible, with the largest conceivable outfit of current axioms, in all departments of human thought—to make the pupil a good citizen, which is to say, a citizen differing as little as possible, in positive knowledge and habits of mind, from all other citizens. In other words, it is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but this is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.”

“In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die.”

“In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation should not separate the power holders from the rest.”