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Stephen Jay Gould : The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. # Happiness

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Stephen Jay Gould quote-The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and...

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Mrs Humphrey Ward : " The first law of story-telling. Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it. " # Happiness

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Ernest Hemingway : " Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. " # Happiness

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Jean De La Bruyere : " One mark of a second-rate mind is to be always telling stories. " # Happiness

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Raymond Chandler : " A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. " # Happiness

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Walter Benjamin : " Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. " # Happiness

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Willa Cather : " There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. " # Happiness

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Eric Hoffer : " Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story -- a story that is basically without meaning or pattern. " # Happiness

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John Steinbeck : " We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say -- and to feel -- Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought. " # Happiness

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Kevin Smith : " On one hand I'll stand up there and think I'm a pretty good storyteller but it has everything to do with the audience. Invariably, I get people telling me that I should do stand-up. Stand-ups generate their own material, but I'm up there answering questions and they lob me softballs. " # Happiness

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Wilhelm Reich : " MAN IS FUNDAMENTALLY AN ANIMAL. Animals, as distinct from man, are not machine-like, not sadistic; their societies, within the same species, are incomparably more peaceful than those of man. The basic question, then is: What has made the animal, man, degenerate into a machine? When I say "animal," I do not mean anything bad, cruel or "base"; I am stating a biological fact. Man has developed the peculiar concept that he is not an animal at all, but, well — man; a creature which long since has shed that which is "bad," which is "animal." He demarcates himself in all possible ways from the bad animal and points, in proof of his "being better," to culture and civilization which distinguish him from the animal. He shows, in his whole behavior, his "theories of values," his moral philosophies, his "monkey trials" and such, that he does not want to be reminded of the fact that basically he is an animal, an animal, furthermore, which has much more in common with the "animal" than with that being which he asserts to be and dreams of being. The theory of the German Übermensch has this origin. Man shows by his maliciousness, his inability to live in peace with his kind, his wars, that what distinguishes him from the other animals is only his unbounded sadism and the mechanical trinity of the authoritarian concept of life, mechanistic science and the machine. If one looks at the results of civilization as they present themselves over long periods of time, one finds that these contentions of man are not only erroneous; more than that, they seem to be made expressly for the purpose of making man forget that he is an animal. " # Happiness

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Jim Rohn : " The Bible give us a list of human stories on both sides of the ledger. On list of human stories is used examples -- do what these people did. Another list of human stories is used as warnings -- don't do what these people did. So if your story ever gets in one of these books, make sure they use it as an example, not a warning. " # Happiness

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Stephen Jay Gould Wisdom feed

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Stephen Jay Gould: " I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." # Business # Work # Time and Time Management

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Stephen Jay Gould: " The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question." # Happiness

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Stephen Jay Gould: " Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality). But the prods often include dreams, quirks, and errors—just as we may obtain crucial bursts of energy from foodstuffs or pharmaceuticals of no objective or enduring value. Great truth can emerge from small error. Evolution is thrilling, liberating, and correct. And Macrauchenia is a litoptern." # Faith # Truth # Mistakes

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Stephen Jay Gould: " Debate is an art form. It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with establishing fact—which creationists have mastered. Some of those rules are: never say anything positive about your own position because it can be attacked, but chip away at what appear to be the weaknesses in your opponent's position. They are good at that. I don't think I could beat the creationists at debate. I can tie them. But in courtrooms they are terrible, because in courtrooms you cannot give speeches. In a courtroom you have to answer direct questions about the positive status of your belief. We destroyed them in Arkansas. On the second day of the two-week trial we had our victory party!" # Science and Scientists # Politicians and Politics # Argument

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Stephen Jay Gould: " In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence […]. Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?" # Defense # Life and Living # Baseball

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Stephen Jay Gould: " Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most “obvious,” “accurate,” and “natural” style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement." # Choice # Arts and Artists # Fiction

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Stephen Jay Gould: " Each and every loss becomes an instance of ultimate tragedy—something that once was, but shall never be known to us. The hump of the giant deer—as a nonfossilizable item of soft anatomy—should have fallen into the maw of erased history. But our ancestors provided a wondrous rescue, and we should rejoice mightily. Every new item can instruct us; every unexpected object possesses beauty for its own sake; every rescue from history's great shredding machine is—and I don't know how else to say this—a holy act of salvation for a bit of totality." # Death and Dying # Beauty # Sex

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Stephen Jay Gould: " My visceral perception of brotherhood harmonizes with our best modern biological knowledge. […] Many people think (or fear) that equality of human races represents a hope of liberal sentimentality probably squashed by the hard realities of history. They are wrong. This essay can be summarized in a single phrase, a motto if you will: Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not true by definition; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn't happen." # Movies # Love # Action

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Stephen Jay Gould: " I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms." # Food and Eating # Conservatives # Morality

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Stephen Jay Gould: " The argument of the “long view” may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children's children's children—hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale." # Behavior # Mistakes # Children

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