John Medina
- in "Brain Rules", chapter "7-Sleep"
One NASA study showed that a 26-minute nap improved a pilot's performance by more than 34 percent. Another study showed that a 45-minute nap produced a similar boost in cognitive performance, lasting more than six hours.
John Wood
- Education
Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Kim Stanley Robinson, in "Fifty Degrees Below"
Current economy defines 5.4% unemployment as optimum for desired "wage-pressure balance", treating labor (people) as a commodity and using a supply-demand pricing model. If government-insured full employment reduced "wage pressure", forcing a rise in the minimum wages from the private sector, this would help pull millions out of poverty, decrease their government dependance and social service costs, and inject and cycle their larger incomes back into the economy.
Kim Stanley Robinson
- Kim Stanley Robinson, voicing Frank Vanderwall in "Forty Signs of Rain"
People plugging away in the same old ways, trying to do things according to the plan, even a flawed plan: normal science, in Kuhnian terms, as well as in the more ordinary sense. All so normal, so trusting that the system worked, when obviously the system was both rigged and broken. How could they persevere? How could they be so blinkered, so determined, so dense?
Louis E Boone
- Don't fear failure
Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.
Mark Rovner
- When Things Become Chaotic
Like all good Buddhists, I believe that when things become chaotic and complicated, it becomes ever more urgent to cut through the noise, simplify and hone in on what really matters.
H. Jackson Brown
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails, explore, dream, discover.
Mike Kaspari
- On rediscovering ideas
In most cases, those insights will constitute a rediscovery (the nature of 99% of all insights). (...) Some small proportion of the time, you will make a connection that is the genesis of a new, truly cool idea.
Norman Doidge
- The Brain That Changes Itself, Chapter 4, "Acquiring Tastes and Loves"
Unlearning in love allows us to change our image of ourselves, for the better if we have an adoring partner. But it also helps account for our vulnerability when we fall in love, and explains why so many self-possessed young men and women who fall in love with a manipulative, undermining or devaluing person often lose all sense of self and become plagued with self-doubt from which it may take them years to recover.
Terry Prattchett
- from "Nation", by Terry Prattchett (p.97 of Corgui pocket edition)
It was a game. He loved it when she assembled her facts and pinned him down with cast-iron argument. He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty which dismissed all opposition.
Terry Pratchett
- from "Making Money" by Terry Pratchett, pages 234-235, pocket edition
It was true that he was not, in a proper sense, a madman. He was, by certain standards, very sane. Faced with a world too busy, complex and incomprehensible to deal with, he'd reduced it to a small bubble just big enough to hold him and his palette. It was nice and quiet in there. All the noises were far away, and they couldn't spy on him.
Theodore Roosevelt
Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, "Certainly I can!" Then get busy and find out how to do it. - Theodore Roosevelt. (1858 - 1919).
Eric Michael Johnson
- Mendeleev's unique combination of an empirical methodology with a speculative nature
The common approach at the time was to teach science through the memorization of established truths, like the rows of Latin verbs that Mendeleev was punished for reciting incorrectly as a boy. But it was Mendeleev's unique combination of an empirical methodology with a speculative nature that drove him to envision novel interpretations of the chemical evidence.
V.E. Grum-Grzhimailo
During the whole lecture Mendeleev taught us how to observe phenomena of everyday life and how to understand them: He imparted on his pupils his skill in observing and thinking, which no one book can give.
Dmitri Mendeleev
I have endeavored to incite in the reader a spirit of inquiry, which, dissatisfied with speculative reasonings alone, should subject every idea to experiment, encourage the habit of stubborn work, and excite a search for fresh chains of evidence to complete the bridge over the bottomless unknown.
Elizabeth Gilbert
- Eat Pray Love
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.
