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The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right.
 
There are no facts, only interpretations.
 
Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
 
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
 
No general description of the mode of advance of human knowledge can be just which leaves out of account the social aspect of knowledge. That is of its very essence. What a thing society is! The workingman, with his trade union, knows that. Men and women moving in polite society understand it, still better. But Bohemians, like me, whose work is done in solitude, are apt to forget that not only is a man as a whole little better than a brute in solitude, but also that everything that bears any important meaning to him must receive its interpretation from social considerations.
 
A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.
 
Conscious evolution begins as we take responsibility for clearing our own obstructions.
 
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
 
You can't think decently if you're not willing to hurt yourself.
 
We social scientists would do well to hold back our eagerness to control that world which we so imperfectly understand. The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control. Rather our studies could be inspired by a more ancient, but today less honoured, motive: a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty.
 
To conquer oneself is a greater victory than to conquer thousands in a battle.
 
To compare is the very nature of a mind that is not awake to discover what is true.
 
But consider a paper published in Science in 2008.1 The authors examined the relationship between math scores and sexual equality in forty countries (based on economic, educational, and political indices of gender equality; the worst was Turkey, the United States was middling, and, naturally, the Scandinavians were tops). Lo and behold, the more gender equal the country, the less of a discrepancy in math scores. By the time you get to the Scandinavian countries, it’s statistically insignificant. And by the time you examine the most gender-equal country on earth at the time, Iceland, girls are better at math than boys.
 
The new comes out of the random.
 
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
 
We are here to make another world.
 
You can change your life with a simple shift of attention. But to make that simple shift, you have to find your heart. It's the only way. Accept yourself, then transcend yourself.
 
I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror.
 
The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.
 
In individuals madness is a rarity, but in groups, parties, peoples it is the rule.
 
2718 quotes