Generating Quotes

Prayer, like radium, is a luminous and self-generating form of energy. ~ Alexis Carrel

Of course, I prefer organic farming to chemical-dependent farming, but sometimes absolutist organic prescriptions go too far. I don't even rule out the possibility of genetic modification generating some benign ideas, as long as we can keep them away from monopolists such as Monsanto. ~ Tristram Stuart

Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential. ~ Adam M. Grant

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up. ~ George Saunders

Someone had to insert a note of peevishness into this hellishly halcyon Keep Calm and Carry On. Generating some reputable resentment, giving voice to the free-floating outrage that imbued their environs like smoke from a burnt dinner - it was a job to do, as Avery's tireless goodwill was a job. With corresponding self-sacrifice, he'd taken on the less glamorous task of reminding the rest that this sucked, it all sucked, it wasn't fair! ~ Lionel Shriver

The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death. ~ Sigmund Freud

One of the fundamental preconditions of successful socialist construction is to ensure the people's readiness to defend themselves from the ravages of probable regional or global wars on the basis of the balance of forces generating from the basic contradictions of our epoch. ~ Mengistu Haile Mariam

A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations. ~ Carl Jung

This "Hawking temperature" of a black hole and its "Hawking radiation" (as they came to be called) were truly radical - perhaps the most radical theoretical physics discovery in the second half of the twentieth century. They opened our eyes to profound connections between general relativity (black holes), thermodynamics (the physics of heat) and quantum physics (the creation of particles where before there were none). For example, they led Stephen to prove that a black hole has entropy, which means that somewhere inside or around the black hole there is enormous randomness. He deduced that the amount of entropy (the logarithm of the hole's amount of randomness) is proportional to the hole's surface area. His formula for the entropy is engraved on Stephen's memorial stone at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where he worked.
For the past forty-five years, Stephen and hundreds of other physicists have struggled to understand the precise nature of a black hole's randomness. It is a question that keeps on generating new insights about the marriage of quantum theory with general relativity - that is, about the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity. ~ Stephen Hawking

It is clear, then, that the desire for certainty shapes our spaces of possibility, our perceptions, and our lives both personally and professionally. Usually, this need saves us. But it also sabotages us. This produces an ongoing tension between what we might think of as our conscious selves and our automatic selves. To overcome our inborn reflex that pushes us to seek certainty (sometimes at any cost), we must lead with our conscious selves and tell ourselves a new story, one that with insistent practice will change our future past and even our physiological responses. We must create internal and external ecologies that… celebrate doubt!
This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn't actually our environment as such, or our" intelligence, or even - ironically - the challenge of reaching the mythical "aha" moment. Rather, it is the nature of human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity ~ Beau Lotto

The masses have yet to realize that generating your own electricity is a potentially hazardous activity to engage in. ~ Steven Magee

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before. ~ Lester R. Brown

Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'. ~ Barry Schwartz

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability. ~ Ronald A. Fisher

If you really don't know where to start or if you're stuck, start generating random connections and allow your intuition to tell you if one might lead somewhere interesting. ~ John Cleese

If people grow things themselves, their children understand, then schools in the area know that this community's generating something with its own energy, to consume. ~ Arthur Potts Dawson

generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers. ~ Alan Greenspan

APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules. ~ Jim Highsmith

Each of is endlessly generating waves with our actions. If you could see the earth from a vibratory point of view, you would see something like radio waves billions of them, cascading constantly into very complex patterns all over the earth. ~ Frederick Lenz

Social media, like blogs, are truth-seeking technologies. In fact, the Internet itself is the greatest truth-generating device ever created. ~ Jason Calacanis

I was so dedicated to generating income to keep my family housed and clothed and schooled. That mattered to me. And playing good golf mattered to me. The rest of the things, like how my record stacked up against others, never made that much difference. ~ Billy Casper

I'm glad I went through the training because I've met such great mentors and lifelong friends/collaborators along the way. Also, any training (acting, movement, dance, piano, singing, etc) allowed me to hone my skills and find an inner space of self-generating creativity. ~ Jade Hassoune

Change requires leaving our comfort zones and plunging headfirst into uncomfortable situations. It's true this causes some pain and discomfort for a moment, but it's the quickest path to generating long-term fulfillment. ~ Yehuda Berg

When I was releasing EPs by myself, I was generating royalties. And when I signed, I thought I'd put those royalties into other artists. And interestingly, streaming is most of the income for those artists. ~ Gabrielle Aplin

Our planning consisted of starting up our project by generating some income through t-shirts and small products. Then we worked our way up with art shows and art projects that I'm creating under our collective. Only then did we announce the comic book, because if we don't do these things before, no one is going to care what you're doing for the bigger project that you've got coming next. We worked it up in steps, and once we announced the comic project it all came together. ~ K. Guillory

The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

So if we are really concerned about generating more taxes, we ought to be investing in our people, not taking away the kinds of resources that contribute to their ability to become greater taxpayers in this country. ~ Patrick J. Kennedy

We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks - water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land - and not by generating renewable flows. ~ Joseph J. Romm

Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did ... The downside ... is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real. ~ Morris Berman

I felt that blush in my chest as we talked stupid talk never quite revealing our queerness to each other but somehow wordlessly generating volumes of desire like some kind of sublanguage that makes you want to splash into it even with all its tensions. ~ David Wojnarowicz

The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist. ~ Brian Eno

The all-consuming selves we take for granted today are "merely empty receptacles of desire." Infinitely plastic and decentered, the modern citizen of the republic of consumption lives on slippery terrain, journeying to nowhere in particular. So too, nothing could be more corrosive of the kinds of social sympathy and connectedness that constitute the emotional substructure of collective resistance and rebellion.
Instead, consumer culture cultivates a politics of style and identity focused on the rights and inner psychic freedom of the individual, one not comfortable with an older ethos of social rather than individual liberation. On the contrary, it tends to infantilize, encouraging insatiable cravings for more and more novel forms of a faux self-expression. The individuality it promises is a kind of perpetual tease, nowadays generating, for example, an ever-expanding galaxy of internet apps leaving in their wake a residue of chronic anticipation. Hibernating inside this "material girl" quest for more stuff and self-improvement is a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be, a "transubstantiation of goods, using products and gear to create a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment… in which their best and most admirable self will emerge at last." The privatization of utopia! Still, what else is there? ~ Steve Fraser

When we root ourselves so that we are experiencing love on all levels - feeling it in our body and heart, accepting love, surrounded by love, generating love - then we are giving as well as receiving at the same time that we are connected to God. ~ Laura Lane

But a lot of our thinking is caught up in dwelling on the past, trying to control the future, generating misperceptions, and worrying about what others are thinking. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A whole range of activities remained largely unregulated, spontaneously generating separate forms of organisation, and existing independently of any consecrated 'official' To overlook the extent of private initiative would be to ignore a major impulse to early Christian expansion. In homes, whole families adopted a style of life modelled on the Apostles ... ~ Judith Herrin

[ ... ] a familiar art historical narrative [ ... ] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [ ... ] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. ~ Grant H. Kester

More and more countries of the world have decided that corporations do a better job of generating and deploying capital than do states. ~ Max L. Stackhouse

Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roods of cars, generating atmostphere. What they don't show you is how the legs of your suit caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you're supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you're mentally tracking the trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don't convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splater with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars. ~ Jonathan Tropper

To work our way towards a shared language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life. ~ Christopher Alexander

We commonly think of freedom as the ability to define alternatives and choose between them. The creative mind exceeds this liberty in being able to redefine itself and reality at large, generating whole new sets of alternatives. ~ Robert Grudin

They're trying to put data centers in cold environments because they're actually generating so much heat now; they're using up so much electricity. ~ Rick Smolan

Onlookers frequently confuse edge with style ... Edge means generating excess returns because of mispricing. Style suggests being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes edge and style overlap, sometimes they don't. ~ Michael Mauboussin

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations. ~ Umberto Eco

The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like 'optics' or 'thermodynamics' are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artificially generating spherically symmetric gravity fields. Having ~ Ted Chiang

I could drive myself mad contemplating a great nothingness filled with a billion pinpoints of light and millions of drifting planets generating their myriad biological I=kingdom of insect, animal, sentient witness. ~ Anne Rice

History is replete with rulers who maintained stability at the cost of justice, humanity and morality. Everyone from Adolf Hitler to Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi managed productive economies, sophisticated bureaucracies and large populations whilst simultaneously generating simmering dissent. ~ Sidin Vadukut

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact. ~ Larry Page

So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist ... If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

I believe that States should be credited for their non-Federal investment in revenue-generating transportation facilities to address their regional transportation needs. ~ Michael Burgess

A genius is someone who can tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty while generating as many ideas as possible. ~ Marty Neumeier

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

When viewed at the next quantum level of perspective, from which the Earth is seen as an organism and humans are seen as microorganisms, the human species looks like a menace to the planet. In fact, the human race is looking a lot like a disease
comprised of organisms excessively multiplying, mindlessly consuming, and generating waste with little regard for the health and well-being of its host
planet Earth. ~ Joseph Jenkins

On the one hand, this is a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate - the extirpation of the long term extends backwards as well as forwards in time (for example, media stories monopolize attention for a week or so then are instantly forgotten); on the other hand, it is a culture that is excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty. It may be that Jameson's identification and analysis of this temporal antimony is his most important contribution to our understanding of postmodern/post-Fordist culture. ~ Mark Fisher

Generating a system architecture is not a deterministic process. It requires careful consideration of business requirements, technology choices, existing infrastructure and systems, and actual physical resources, such as budget and manpower. ~ Andrew Holdsworth

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. ~ William Gibson

Theology necessitates an image of God as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope who cares about humans and imposes moral codes and responsibilities upon them, thereby generating serious intellectual questions such as: 'Why does God allow us to sin?' 'Does the Sixth Commandment prohibit war?' ~ Rodney Stark

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service ofmankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hatingoneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love. ~ Alan Watts

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts. ~ David Leavitt

California had organized itself, not accidentally, into highly partisan legislative districts. It elected highly partisan people to office and then required these people to reach a two-thirds majority to enact any new tax or meddle with big spending decisions. On the off chance that they found some common ground, it could be pulled out from under them by voters through the initiative process. Throw in term limits - no elected official now serves in California government long enough to fully understand it - and you have a recipe for generating maximum contempt for elected officials. Politicians are elected to get things done and are prevented by the system from doing it, leading the people to grow even more disgusted with them. "The vicious cycle of contempt," as Mark Paul calls it. California state government was designed mainly to maximize the likelihood that voters will continue to despise the people they elect. ~ Michael Lewis

The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in ones lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same ole addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma ( and also of western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Barack Obama seems intent on enrolling more people on food stamps. Mitt Romney's focus is going to be on generating more jobs that will make food-stamps unnecessary for them. ~ Mike Huckabee

What makes America unique is not that it built MIT, or that its grads are generating economic growth and innovation, but that every state in the country has universities trying to do the same. "America has 4,000 colleges and universities," said Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. "The rest of the world combined has 7,768 institutions of higher education. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Survivors are often good at both resolving and generating crisis. While this capacity to handle crisis can make you a good emergency room worker or ambulance driver, it can also be a way for you to keep yourself from feeling. If you are addicted to intensity and drama ... you may be running from yourself. ~ Ellen Bass

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance. ~ Jane Smiley

[On generating controversy] Heat sells better than light. ~ Jen Lawrence

In the mid-1980s, operating problems took [nuclear] plants off-line so often that, on an annual basis, they operated at only about 55 percent of their rated total generating capacity. Today, as a result of several decades of experience and an intense focus on performance ... nuclear plants in the United States operate at over 90 percent of capacity. That improvement in operating efficiently is so significant in its impact that it can almost be seen as a new source in electric power itself. ~ Daniel Yergin

Money begets money. If you don't have that, you wait around to be hired by somebody at the mercy of others. If you have that money in your hand, you desperately try to make the best use of it and move ahead. And that's generating income for yourself. ~ Muhammad Yunus

Generating text yourself requires more cognitive effort than does reading, and effort increases memorability, ~ Clive Thompson

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I prefer to take the view of businesspeople who are actually generating jobs and creating wealth. ~ Michael Gove

Capital exists because we create it. We created it yesterday (and every day for the last two hundred years or so). If we do not create it tomorrow, it will cease to exist. Its existence depends on the constant repetition of the process of exploitation (and of all the social processes that make exploitation possible). It is not like Frankenstein's creature. It does not have an existence independent of our doing. It does not have a duration, a durable independent existence. It only appears to have a duration. The same is true of all the derivative forms of capital (state, money, etc.). The continuity of these monsters (these forms of social relations) is not something that exists independent of us: their continuity is a continuity that is constantly generated and re-generated by our doing. The fact that we have reasons for generating capital does not alter the fact that capital depends for its existence from one day to the next, from one moment to the next, on our act of creation. Capital depends upon us: that is the ray of hope in a world that seems so black. ~ John Holloway

If conservatives really believed in individual liberty, as they endlessly claim and if they used both halves of their brains then they'd be libertarians . Instead, they sabotage themselves, and their cause, by constantly generating one spurious reason after another to deprive other people of their freedom. ~ L. Neil Smith

When we were filming 'The Darkest Hour,' we didn't even know what the aliens were going to look like, we didn't even have a graphic reference. So it was definitely a big challenge to sell those kind of extreme moments when you're just generating them from your own imagination. ~ Olivia Thirlby

I love improv so much. Listening. I think that's the key. When you improvise, you put a lot of pressure on yourself to create, and to be generating information, and trying to be funny, but if you just listen to what's being said to you, and then react honestly, you generally get better results. ~ Rob Riggle

Most "original" ideas aren't completely original, but instead are the result of two basic methods for generating ideas: problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems. ~ Barry Nalebuff

The full beauty of the subject of generating functions emerges only from tuning in on both channels: the discrete and the continuous. ~ Herbert Wilf

Do we allow unlimited visitation, or do we restrict numbers to protect a delicate ecosystem? Do we heavily advertise the park, enticing paying visitors, generating needed money for Idaho's park department, or do we sacrifice financial benefits to better preserve natural ones? Do we log diseased trees, interfering with nature, or do we allow trees to rot and fall, possibly endangering lives? Do we inexpensively repair historic structures, or do we meticulously restore them? Do we maintain this park as closely as possible to the condition in which Idaho received it, or do we develop it for multiple uses; allow overnight visitors; permit all-terrain vehicles; provide paths for those unable to navigate unpaved trails? ~ Mary E. Reed

One thing was clear to the ministers and civil servants who framed these policies: Britain's colonies and the new transatlantic commerce they were generating were a vital national asset to be coveted, protected and extended, if necessary by aggression. ~ Lawrence James

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. This ~ Kevin Kelly

sound," in a different way. Most instruments produce tones that are quite complex, each generating a series of overtones that contribute to our perception of their timbre and that exist in each note played on the instrument, defining its unique, haunting sound. A clarinet, for instance, produces a series of overtones in which some of ~ Bernie Krause

There must always remain, however, from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. Hence the common divorce of opportunism from virtue and the resultant degeneration of human existence. Martyrdom is for saints, but the common people have their institutions, and these cannot be left to grow like lilies of the field; Peter keeps drawing his sword, as in the garden, to defend the creator and sustainer of the world. The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the word. How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of "yes" and "no" revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void? ~ Joseph Campbell

The 1,230 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power generating capacity in place at the end of 2009 now constitutes just over 25 percent of total generating capacity worldwide. This is over three times nuclear generating capacity and roughly 38 percent of the capacity of fossil fuel-burning power plants worldwide. ~ Christopher Flavin

According to the science of cybernetics, which deals with the topic of control in every kind of system (mechanical, electronic, biological, human, economic, and so on), there is a natural law that governs the capacity of a control system to work. It says that the control must be capable of generating as much "variety" as the situation to be controlled. ~ Anthony Stafford Beer

Hermione," Harry said seriously, as he started to dig down into the red-velvet pouch again, "don't punish yourself when a bright idea doesn't work out. You've got to go through a lot of flawed ideas to find one that might work. And if you send your brain negative feedback by frowning when you think of a flawed idea, instead of realizing that idea-suggesting is good behavior by your brain to be encouraged, pretty soon you won't think of any ideas at all." Harry put down two heart-shaped chocolates beside the book. "Here, have another chocolate. Besides the one from earlier, I mean. This one is to reinforce your brain for generating a good candidate strategy. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. ~ M. John Harrison

The physiological combustion theory takes as its starting point the fundamental principle that the amount of heat that arises from the combustion of a given substance is an invariable quantity-i.e., one independent of the circumstances accompanying the combustion-from which it is more specifically concluded that the chemical effect of the combustible materials undergoes no quantitative change even as a result of the vital process, or that the living organism, with all its mysteries and marvels, is not capable of generating heat out of nothing. ~ Robert Mayer

Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer. ~ H.W. Brands

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter. ~ Brian Aldiss

Email is 20-30 times more effective in generating a purchase than any other tool. ~ Josh Kaufman

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines. ~ Ralph Nader

Individual free choices" can only be the expression of an "individual free will".
The notion of an "individual free will" generating "individual free choices" creates a much needed consequence: personal accountability.
Personal accountability is vital for a primitive, immature human organization based on reprehension or praise.
The permanent interaction of a unique inherited Nature (and maybe a unique "soul") with a unique nurture (environment), will always determine all our "individual free choices", from cradle to grave.
It is impossible for the individual to be sentient before birth and choose these two or three unique factors.
The logic of holding someone personally accountable for a "non-chosen" choice eludes me.
The notion of individual free will can at best be a "gut felt" illusion, but can never have logical relevance.
What sort of human (and divine!) organization can be based on the consequence of a "gut felt" illusion?
-Our current one; primitive, illogical, unstable and permanently conflictual.

Be it for all individual choices or all differences, the definitive ban of the illusionary notion of personal accountability is the missing step that will lead to human maturity.

How's your "gut" now? ~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

A 2011 report produced by Forrester Research estimated that the revenue generated through the sales of smartphone and tablet applications will reach $38 billion annually by 2015. Think about that: An industry that did not exist in 2006 will be generating $38 billion in revenues within a decade ... ~ Thomas Friedman

Generating ideas is not a problem. Incubation is. Acceleration is. ~ Rita Gunther McGrath

So what are MHGs for? "They are tools of control used by purveyors of religion to cement their grip on power," says Pagel. "As soon as you have a large society generating lots of goods and services, this wealth can be put to use by someone who can grab the reins of power. The most immediate way to do this is to align yourself with a supreme deity and then make lists of things people can and cannot do, and these become 'morals' when applied to our social behaviour. ~ Anonymous

EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure - electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. ~ John Perkins

Whenever you have something looping, you essentially have something generating information with less information. ~ Tristan Perich

But insensate Time is nothing if not cruel and heartless. It corrodes then destroys, so that the man you literally and figuratively looked up to with your chubby face, who scooped you up to cross the street and patted you on the head to laughter, will later look through you from a crooked hospital bed then blindly up at you while wearing makeup in a bargain casket. The people who now surround you generating warmth will disappear leaving only an empty chill; the body you own and the brain it houses will malfunction. And sometimes, especially in Boxing, a twenty four year old can become a man overnight. ~ Sergio De La Pava

A person breathes in nearly 2 pounds of oxygen a day, so that's the daily requirement for about ten thousand people. Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen. But only during the day. Trees manufacture large amounts of carbohydrates not only to lay them down as wood but also to satisfy their hunger. Trees use carbohydrates as fuel, just as we do, and when they do, they convert sugar into energy and carbon dioxide. During the day, this doesn't affect the air much because after all the additions and subtractions, there is still that surplus oxygen I just mentioned. At night, however, the trees don't photosynthesize, and so they don't break down carbon dioxide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the darkness, it's all about using carbohydrates, burning sugar in the cells' power-generating stations, and releasing carbon dioxide. But don't worry, you won't suffocate if you take a nighttime ramble! A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable. ~ Peter Wohlleben

Instead of the primitive raw material economy, we will create a smart economy generating unique knowledge, new useful things and technologies. Instead of the archaic society, in which the leaders think and make decisions for everyone, we will become a country of intelligent, free and responsible people ~ Dmitry Medvedev