Book Quotes

“Understanding is more often used to try and alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.”

“In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.”

“That was one reason Amos didn’t particularly like to think or talk about emotion; he didn’t like things that were hard to measure.”

“Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over.”

“It is the anticipation of regret that affects decisions, along with the anticipation of other consequences... There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.”

“When people make decisions, they are also making judgements about similarity, between some object in the real world and what they ideally want... ‘similarity has two faces: casual and derivative. It serves as a basis for the classification of objects, but is also influenced by the adopted classification.’”

“Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.”

“... it is only a German’s conceit that is based on an abstract idea - science, that is, the supposed possession of absolute truth... A conceited German is the worst of them all, and the most hardened of all, and the most repulsive of all; for he imagines that he possesses the truth in a science of his own invention, which to him is absolute truth.”