Toni > Toni's Quotes

“Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways:
Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.”
― Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

“Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” The teenage Musk then arrived at his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“There needs to be a reason for a grade. I’d rather play video games, write software, and read books than try and get an A if there’s no point in getting an A.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

“Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“In general, human societies are not innovative. They are hierarchical and ritualistic. Suggestions for change are greeted with suspicion: they imply an unpleasant future variation in ritual and hierarchy: an exchange of one set of rituals for another, or perhaps for a less structured society with fewer rituals. And yet there are times when societies must change.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“As a consequence of the enormous social and technological changes of the last few centuries, the world is not working well. We do not live in traditional and static societies. But our government, in resisting change, act as if we did. Unless we destroy ourselves utterly, the future belongs to those societies that, while not ignoring the reptilian and mammalian parts of our being, enable the characteristically human components of our nature to flourish; to those societies that encourage diversity rather than conformity; to those societies willing to invest resources in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural experiments, and prepared to sacrifice short-term advantage for long-term benefit; to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.”
― Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

“Personal responsibility is not only undervalued but actually discouraged by the standard classroom model, with its enforced passivity and rigid boundaries of curriculum and time. Denied the opportunity to make even the most basic decisions about how and what they will learn, students stop short of full commitment.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Why has it been accepted as gospel for so long that homework is necessary? The answer, I think, lies not in the perceive virtues of homework but rather in the clear deficiencies of what happens in the classroom. Homework becomes necessary because not enough learning happens during the school day... The broadcast, one-pace-fits-all lecture... turns out to be a highly inefficient way to teach and learn.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“Can you imagine if someone told Einstein, Okay, wrap up this relativity thing, we’re moving on to European history? Or said to Michelangelo, Time’s up for the ceiling, now go paint the walls. Yet versions of this snuffing out of creativity and boundary-stretching thought happen all the time in conventional schools.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“for All Ages Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. —HENRY FORD It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. —MARGARET MEAD”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow.”
― Salman Khan, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”
― Amy Bloom

“Learning, thinking, and writing should not be about accumulating knowledge, but about becoming a different person with a different way of thinking. This is done by questioning one’s own thinking routines in light of new experiences and facts.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

“The real enemy of independent thinking is not an external authority, but our own inertia. The ability to generate new ideas has more to do with breaking with old habits of thinking than with coming up with as many ideas as possible.”
― Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers

“It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed,” Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams in the midst of the American Revolution, suggesting that “the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.” Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life—a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“no man is superior, unless it was by merit, and no man is inferior, unless by his demerit.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“Avoid dull facts; create memorable images; translate every issue into people’s lives; use simple, everyday language; never use big words when small words will do. Simplify the concept that “we are trying to construct a more inclusive society” into “we are going to make a country in which no one is left out.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any field—the motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge–a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ