Words of Wisdom

“There is no part of planet Earth which has so recently arrived on our desk as a challenge and as an opportunity. So therefore, cooperation in the Arctic is one of the most crucial issues of the 21st-century” -Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, President of Iceland, from his Big Think interview

“What is a scientist after all? It is a curious person looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.”

“The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.”

“A skateboarder’s way of thought is so different that I feel if somebody had some sort of dilemma in their life you could ask a skateboarder for an outside opinion.You may get something that is absolutely ridiculous or you could get something that’s absolutely brilliant.” -From his recent Big Think interview

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

“The world and our perceptions have changed a lot, even since the ’70s, but there are lingering stereotypes. If you ask an 11-year-old to draw a scientist, she’s likely to draw a geeky guy with a pocket protector. That’s just not an image an 11-year-old girl aspires to.”

“We don’t have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.”

“So whatever you’re trying to do, you need to remember that there will always be better than, less than and different than. That means whoever’s the best – in professional wrestling you might say Hulk Hogan. Everybody under him, less than. Except for the person or company that’s different than. That’s what DDP Yoga is. That’s what Diamond Dallas Page the wrestler was.” From his recent Big Think interview.

“It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question’ who am I’ except the voice inside herself.” 

“The Nobel Prize is fine, but the drugs I’ve developed are rewards in themselves.”

“It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.”

“You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized.”

“To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.”  

“It’s important to remember that Holmes wasn’t born Holmes. Holmes was born like you and me but probably with greater potential for certain elements of observation, but he learned over time to think like Sherlock Holmes.” -Author Maria Konnikova, from her Big Think Interview

Author Jeffrey Kluger describes how even Gandhi and MLK exhibited narcissistic behaviors in his recent Big Think Interview.

“I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them.” Christopher Reeve would have been 62-years-old yesterday. Next month will mark the ten-year anniversary of his death.

“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.”

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

“Think not the bigotry of another is any excuse for your own.” -John Wesley, English preacher and co-founder of the Methodist movement  

Have you been watching The Roosevelts on PBS? Big Think Expert Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses Theodore Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit.”

Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris discusses a form of spirituality founded on science and reason.

“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”

“In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.” -Timothy Leary

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”  – Maya Angelou, from Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993)  

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) is best known for her early feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. Two years earlier, Wollstonecraft […]

The above quote is pulled from Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) long-form narrative essay A Room of One’s Own, which was first published in 1929. Room is one of the English writer’s many […]

Sir William Beveridge (1879-1963) was a British economist and social reformer best known for his 1942 report titled “Social and Allied Services” (PDF), though often simply referred to as the […]

“I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their […]

“When you have critical mass of women [guiding companies], the companies produce better performance. So you have more innovation, you have better financial management, you have greater success rates by having more women. Why leave them out?” –Vivek […]