Loh Kean Yew Quotes

Yew? Not roight in the 'ead? Jus' let me tell yew somefink yew cockeyed idiot. Oi moight call yew daft sometimes, but that don't mean yew're crazy. If'n yew're not roight in the head, then Oi'm Mussolini's fairy godmother. ~ Peter St. John

A fully plastic brain learns everything and remembers nothing. ~ Sam Kean

Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry ~ Sam Kean

Negative experiences can wire neurons together, too. ~ Sam Kean

Biologists summarize these hypothalamic duties as the "four F's" of animal behavior - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, well, sexual congress. ~ Sam Kean

in Japan, buying a lot of stuff for your children is considered indulgent. Wastefulness was frowned upon. Shopping bags should be saved to reuse many times, not recycled after one purchase. ~ Christine Gross-Loh

We crowned ourselves Homo sapiens, the wise ape, but Homo limbus might have been more apt. ~ Sam Kean

Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

In my case, when it arrived at 49, perimenopause was terrifying and like nothing I had ever before physically experienced. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Life at the top may be privileged, but it is not simple. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

(Rutherford himself was fond of saying, "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting" - words ~ Sam Kean

It is during fertility that a female loses herself and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I'm a journalist, so my friends are journalists: magazines, newspapers, even public radio. Nobody had their kids in public school. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I am a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl's. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

In our 20s, women in my generation, we all wanted to be Laurie Anderson. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Thirteen aluminum atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine, the two entities indistinguishable in chemical reactions. ~ Sam Kean

I'm pretty sure that changing diapers of all sizes isn't the kind of women's work Betty Friedan had in mind, nor Linda Hirshman. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a US citizen was 48, so most menopausal women were dead, which is not a great place to be. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

In the 'Mad Men' era, the archetypal dad came home; put down his briefcase; received pipe, Manhattan, roast beef, potatoes, key-lime pie; and was - apparently - content. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Things need shaking up when American women feel endangered even as Yosemite bears lumber around belching, their eyes glazed with surfeit, their pelts covered in Oreo crumbs. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Living in Los Angeles was like being an extra in a movie that was starring other people entirely. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

In the end, the real wisdom of menopause may be in questioning how fun or even sane this chore wheel called modern life actually is. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Certainly, being a 'perfect' mother is unachievable. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Many men today can cook, or at least order takeout, and know where and how to hire domestic help, perhaps with refreshing clarity and less anxiety than ever-conflicted mothers. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

The Japanese high command recognised the sexual needs of the men and provided for them. As a consequence, rape was not frequent. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Every person, genius or moron, has a right to reproduce himself. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

That which is written without much effort is seldom read with much pleasure. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

If you want to reach your goals and dreams, you cannot do it without discipline ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Aluminium's sixty-year reign as the world's most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything. ~ Sam Kean

The problem is that, partly because we are women, a large measure of our happiness depends on our relationships - including, unavoidably, our relationships with men. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Even if we never cure a single disease, the Human Genome Project and other ventures will have been worth it. ~ Sam Kean

Germans at the time believed, a little oddly, that dyes killed germs by turning the germs' vital organs the wrong color. ~ Sam Kean

You can think about this decoupling as the converse of neurons that fire together wire together. Here, neurons out of sync fail to link. ~ Sam Kean

The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.' ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

For a long time, I kept an eye out for element eighty at school and in books, as you might watch for a childhood friend's name ~ Sam Kean

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in 'middle-class' school districts. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I will never do Pilates. I walk. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Carbon's eastern neighbor on the table, nitrogen, dresses up diamonds in pinks, yellows, oranges, and brownish tints known romantically as 'champagne.' ~ Sam Kean

After about 1940, scientists generally stopped looking for elements in nature. Instead, they had to create them by smashing smaller atoms together. ~ Sam Kean

Today, just two generations on, the Monte Carlo method (in various forms) so dominates some fields that many young scientists don't realize how thoroughly they've departed from traditional theoretical or experimental science. ~ Sam Kean

Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve. ~ Sam Kean

One-man-one-vote is a most difficult form of government.. Results can be erratic. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Please do not assume that you can change governments. Young people don't understand this ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Kindness is goodness hidden in the heart
More often than declared in speech. ~ William Kean Seymour

Kindness is in a prison till it finds
Release in words or deeds. ~ William Kean Seymour

The same law applies to me. Nobody has sued me for libel because I do not defame my enemies. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

I believe that life is a process of continuous change and a constant struggle to make that change one for the better. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

When I think of Chinese parents, I think of people who weep upon hearing Beethoven, but who can't necessarily bring that joy to others. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Whether you wish to chant 'Our houses, our selves' or 'We have houses, hear us roar,' for us women, home is where the heart is. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I don't know how it's going for my sisters, but as my 40s and Verizon bills and mortgage payments roll on, I seem to have an ever more recurring 1950s housewife fantasy. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

No, your job as a leader is to inspire and to galvanize, not to share your distraught thoughts. You make your people dispirited. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too! ~ Matthew Arnold

A deep river of must-have school mania runs through the chattering classes. There is, of course, the parental adrenaline rush at suburban cocktail parties that comes from announcing one's son or daughter as an Ivy Leaguer. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology. ~ Sam Kean

Your body thinks radium is a great thing to pack into bone - where it kills some cells outright and scrambles the DNA of others, causing problems like cancer. ~ Sam Kean

If I was going to pretend to be the supermom next door, it would've been counterfeit and a lie. I figured I had to write something out of a new place. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I think of the friends of mine who were blissfully single in their 20s and 30s. Still single in their 40s and 50s, they seem to be contracting a bit. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

For more details about the Curies especially, see Sheilla Jones's wonderful book The Quantum Ten, an account of the surprisingly contentious and fractious early days of quantum mechanics, circa 1925. ~ Sam Kean

I did not know I was to spend the rest of my life getting Singapore not just to work but to prosper and flourish. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it's nothing less than evolution for elements. ~ Sam Kean

I eye 'Modern Love' warily between that second and third cup of coffee on Sunday mornings, calculating how much of a push I need to get through the day's unhurriedly earnest saga of heartbreak and recovery. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

My generation is so used to having our public spaces look like the Starbucks, with the beautiful lighting and the little bit of Nina Simone and my coffee that's blended a certain way from Costa Rica. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

More congenial to me than dictators
Are rickshaw-runners.
If they break my neck
It will be by accident,
Not as a matter of state policy. ~ William Kean Seymour

One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminum, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils. ~ Sam Kean

Having blown up my own long-term marriage via an extramarital affair, followed by a traumatic divorce, I tend to think of love as less a gently glowing hearth than a set of flaming train tracks you strap yourself onto. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them. ~ Sam Kean

I always tried to be correct, not politically correct. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household's natural rhythms. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

The body tends to treat elements in the same column of the periodic table as equivalents. ~ Sam Kean

I think my father, who was Chinese, basically felt if we didn't major in science, we would starve on the streets, so we all went into science unquestioningly. I kind of faked my way through physics. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars ... ~ Ted Hughes

I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she's living with - first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder. ~ Sam Kean

The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

I would not score very highly on religious value. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

The humped bladderwort has yellow, snapdragon-like flowers, and it's actually carnivorous, capable of trapping and eating not just insects but even tadpoles and tiny fish. ~ Sam Kean

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever. ~ Sam Kean

I do not yet know of a man who became a leader as a result of having undergone a leadership course. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

China is a vast, disparate country; there is no alternative to strong central power. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Most mutations involve typos: Something bumps a cell's elbow as it's copying DNA, and the wrong letter appears in a triplet - CAG becomes CCG. ~ Sam Kean

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child. ~ Sam Kean

Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible. ~ Sam Kean

Beating up on public schools is not just our nation's favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off - like debating the most recent toothsome plot twists of 'Big Love' - who, of course, have no dog in the fight. ~ Sandra Tsing Loh

I didn't mind staying home from school and medicating myself with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. Being sick always gave me another chance to break an old-fashioned mercury thermometer, too. ~ Sam Kean

Acid strength is measured by the pH scale, with lower numbers being stronger, and in 2005 a chemist from New Zealand invented a boron-based acid called a carborane, with a pH of -18 ~ Sam Kean

It 'appens to be true. An' if'n yew want ter stay moi friend, yew'd best 'old yer turpitudinous twaddle of a tongue an' listen fer once. ~ Peter St. John

If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Before the Human Genome Project, most scientists assumed, based on our complex brains and behaviors, that humans must have around 100,000 genes; some estimates went as high as 150,000. ~ Sam Kean

I'm not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best. We practise it because that's what the British bequeathed us ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Brains, you see, vary a lot from person to person - they vary as much as faces do. ~ Sam Kean

Kuan Yew, I can never trust you as a politician. ~ Tunku Abdul Rahman

Those who believe that after I have left the government as prime minister, I will go into a permanent retirement, really should have their heads examined. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale. ~ Sam Kean

If there was one formula for our success,it was that we were constantly studying how to make things work,or how to make them work better. ~ Lee Kuan Yew

If Aljunied decides to go that way, well Aljunied has five years to live and repent. ~ Lee Kuan Yew