Hello!

“Like physical events, with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.”

“Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It’s like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There’s no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see both at the same time.”

“It would have surprised the executioner who so closely identified with the victims of crime to hear his society characterized as especially cruel and heartless, particularly once he learned of such unthinkable modern atrocities as genocide, atomic obliteration, and total war.”

“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”

“In distancing Meister Frantz and his fellow executioners from ourselves, we make them safe figures from the world of fairy tales, perpetrators of horrors that cannot touch us, in the process revealing more about our own fears and dreams than about the world we have inherited from them. We view the hooded caricature of modern popular culture with the same patronizing amusement as adults watching children at play, all the time confident of our own superior rationality and sophistication.”

“Contrary to modernist narratives of the civilizing process or gradual conscience formation among later generations, Frantz Schmidt and his contemporaries do not appear to have been more or less prone to cruelty than individuals in the twenty-first century, nor have we seen any evidence of more or less fear, more or less hatred, more or less compassion.”

“We tend to think of premodern Europe as fairly static, but there was in fact considerable geographical mobility.”

“A successful executioner, especially in this era of heightened expectations, also needed what we would call people skills and a certain degree of psychological insight.”

“Timing and luck are important to any personal success. Frantz Schmidt had the good fortune to come to maturity in what historians now call ‘the golden age of the executioner.’”

“The skilled executioner was in that sense the ruling authorities’ most indispensable means of easing their subjects’ fear of lawless attacks and providing some sense of justice in a society where everyone knew that the great majority of dangerous criminals would never be caught or punished. The ritualized violence that the executioner administered on the community’s behalf at once (1) avenged victims; (2) ended the threat represented by dangerous criminals; (3) set a terrifying example; and (4) forestalled further violence at the hands of angry relatives or lynch mobs.”

“The surest sign of the executioner’s relatively enhanced (or rather, less degraded) status in this era was the increasing frequency of reactionary legislation that attempted to restore ‘traditional values’ and the “natural” social order. Like the so-called sumptuary laws of the previous century, imperial police ordinances of 1530 and 1548 required executioners (as well as Jews and prostitutes) to wear ‘distinctive clothing by which they could be readily identified.’ Many local decrees similarly decried the blurring of traditional boundaries and attempted to reverse the perceived trend toward tolerance of all ‘dishonorable’ people, imposing hefty fines or even corporal punishment on those who transgressed.”

“The second half of the sixteenth century saw the emergence of an increasingly global marketplace, a shift with especially dire consequences for traditional craftsmen and their products. But rather than direct their anger at the new breed of extravagantly wealthy bankers or merchants, most ‘poor but honest’ artisans instead attacked seemingly prosperous executioners such as Heinrich Schmidt and other individuals (notably Jews) whom they considered rightfully beneath them.”

“If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.”

“Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.”

“Our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.”

“Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.”

“Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.”

“When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.”

“Negative emotions are a call to action.”

“True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.”

“No matter where you go, there’s a five-hundred-pound load of shit waiting for you. And that’s perfectly fine. The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.”

“You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.”

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

“Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed – and what a relief.”

“The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

“The original Latin word for ‘decide’, decidere, means ‘to cut off’, as in slicing away alternatives; it’s a close cousin of words like ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide’.”

“Smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities.”

“Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem.”

Truthful speech provides, in the sphere of interpersonal communication, a parallel to wisdom in the sphere of private understanding. The two are respectively the outward and inward modalities of the same commitment to what is real.“”

“The English word “morality” and its derivatives suggest a sense of obligation and constraint quite foreign to the Buddhist conception of sīla; this connotation probably enters from the theistic background to Western ethics. Buddhism, with its non-theistic framework, grounds its ethics, not on the notion of obedience, but on that of harmony.”

“The error is taking the body to be the cause of bondage, when the real source of trouble lies in the mind—the mind obsessed by greed, aversion, and delusion.”

“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”

“Since the constituent factors of our being are always changing, utterly devoid of a permanent core, there is nothing we can cling to in them as a basis for security. There is only a constantly disintegrating flux which, when clung to in the desire for permanence, brings a plunge into suffering.”

“Just as perception influences thought, so thought can influence perception.”

“Being part of the elite class does not in itself make one an elitist. Elitism is an attitude: one that looks down upon those who don’t have elite wealth or an elite education, who don’t have the right table manners or the right hobbies. Or…one that looks down upon those who don’t hold the elite’s political views or use the proper elite words and terms. Elitism is a social club with very specific codes and rules, and Social Justice Fundamentalism sure seems like the current set of code words and code views to signify membership. Which is, of course, the very opposite of what progressivism is supposed to be about.”

“It’s as if we like to keep our perception of the world at a constant. So when the world changes, instead of allowing our perception of the world to change, we alter our standards and our definitions to keep our perception the same.”

“Being tolerant, fair, and humane to some people and not others is the definition of intolerance and inhumanity. Everyone is principled when it comes to people and ideas they’re tribally aligned with—a person’s moral integrity is judged precisely by how well they apply their principles to the people they can’t stand.”

“As soon as you realize that news media is also entertainment media, the constant coverage of conflict and drama makes perfect sense.”

“I don’t know what truly motivates today’s media. Maybe they make politically motivated propaganda. Maybe they make profit-motivated entertainment, which happens to double as political propaganda. Whatever the motivation, the consequence is the same: enhanced political tribalism.”

“While an alien attack would suck overall, it would do wonders for species solidarity.”

“Like the human hand or the human eye, the human brain is a tool developed by evolution for a specific set of purposes. Truth wasn’t one of those purposes. We can do truth, but a human doing truth is like a dog standing on its hind legs—it’s a real effort and we’re not in our element.”

“Language is so important because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system: a communal brain.”

“We’re pre-programmed to be low-rung thinkers, so our intellects are always fighting against gravity.”

“The Scientist’s default position on any topic is “I don’t know.””

“Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision.”

“Inertia is a powerful force.”

“Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on?”

“The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone. It will lead to compromises and generalizations. Begin instead with the smallest viable market. What’s the minimum number of people you would need to influence to make it worth the effort?”

“If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.”

“Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don’t want what the marketer wants, don’t believe what they believe, and don’t care about what they care about. They probably never will.”

“It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.”

“The Francis Crozier inua still alive and well in Taliriktug had no illusions about life being anything but poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But perhaps it did not have to be solitary.”

“Don’t dismiss simplicity. Simple means solid.”

“Anger is its own punishment.”

“Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing eles matters.”

“Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.”

“If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here.”

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

“To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.”

“The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgements. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice.”

“Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.”

“Don’t take yourself too seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.”

“If you can’t decide, the answer is no.”

“Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.”

“Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time.”

“You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

“The good news is, the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth.”

“One definition of a moment of suffering is ‘the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.’”

“To be honest, speak without identity.”

“It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.”

“Money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems.”

“Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work.”

“Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks.”

“Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you are retired.”

“99% of effort is wasted.”

“Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”

“It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one’s body is a mental activity.”

“It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them: for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they’d come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew.”

“Every company has their own buying quirks. Don’t be afraid to probe. The better you understand how their process works, the more effectively you can help them figure out if your product is a fit or not.”

“ANYTHING is better than no process. A consistent process that isn’t working well is better than no process, because you can improve consistent systems; you can’t improve random systems.”

“It takes longer than you want to nail your market and messaging. Companies sell to the wrong people and companies ALL THE TIME.”

“That’s the irony of stressing too much about the close itself: the stress can reduce the likelihood of it happening.”

“'Working harder’ translated usually means: ‘What we are doing isn’t working, so do more of it!’”

“Humans’ ability to do science has helped humans refine killing.”

“Sigmund Freud once asserted, ‘Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.’ Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the ‘individual differences’ did not ‘blur’ but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.”

“People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”

“If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.”

“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”

“A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy,”

“Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.”

“In no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

“In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!’”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”

“There are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.”

“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

“We were not hoping for happiness—it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness.”

“The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one’s fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.”

“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.”