Los desastrosos resultados obtenidos por un país gobernado durante ocho décadas por dos grupos políticos fuertemente nacionalistas deberían hacer sospechosa la idea primitiva de que, cuanto más nacionalista es un país, más prometedor es su futuro.
Fernando Iglesias, La cuestión Malvinas: crítica del nacionalismo argentino, Buenos Aires, 2012, p. 21
A meaningul relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, New York, 2011, p. 74
As an industry, it may not yet be as big as oil, but it is older, will last longer, and is vastly more profitable. To profit from oil you have to find it, transport it, refine it and sell it. To profit from psychic readings, you just talk to people and they give you money. And whereas the world will one day run out of oil, it will never run out of people wanting a psychic reading.
Ian Rowland, The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, 3rd ed., London, 2002, p. 9
Aquella noche en Salón Canning, mientras el DJ insistía con Fresedo y no pasaba ni un tema de Pugliese, don Samuel, ochenta anos cumplidos, no perdonaba un solo tango. Con su traje marrón y el inamovible, informe sombrero del mismo color, invitaba a cuanta rubia lo superase ampliamente en altura. En otra ocasión yo lo había invitado a una copa y, sin aludir a su escasa estatura, le pregunté por esa predilección; creo que observé algo así como que no les tenía miedo a las escandinavas. Me respondió con la sonrisa generosa de quien transmite su experiencia de la vida a la generación siguiente.
–Pibe, no hay nada como tener la cabeza empotrada entre un par de buenas tetas.
Edgardo Cozarinsky, Milongas, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 16
What must be done, Sir, will be done.
Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, London, 1791, p. 108
The opinion that a belief in immortality is logically indefensible gains strength, paradoxical as it may seem, from the very fact that most of the western world desire that the belief may be true.
John McTaggart, ‘Some Considerations Relating to Human Immortality’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 13, no. 2 (January, 1903), p. 170
Mientras otros cumplen con rigor un tanto burocrático las tareas intelectuales en que se hallan empeñados y luego, al término del cotidiano deber, buscan descanso en el cinematógrafo, en la tertulia o en la novela trivial, Borges mantiene activo el espíritu en todas las circunstancias. Prolonga en el plano del diálogo ameno las operaciones mentales que lo llevaron a escribir un poema o a examinar los méritos de un libro. No es dable señalar distingos entre su quehacer literario y el tono general de su vida.
Carlos Mastronardi, Borges, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 41
Un monde où le mal es la conditio sine qua non du bien, est un mauvais monde.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlass, Francfort, 1985, vol. 5, p. 104
Nothing is true merely because it is good. Nothing is good merely because it is true. To argue that a thing must be because it ought to be is the last and worst degree of spiritual rebellion–claiming for our ideals the reality of fact. To argue, on the other hand, that a thing must be good because it is true, is the last and worst degree of spiritual servility, which ignores the right and the duty inherent in our possession of ideas–the right and the duty to judge and, if necessary, to condemn the whole universe by the highest standard we can find in our own nature.
John McTaggart, ‘The Necessity of Dogma’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 5, no. 2 (January, 1895), p. 150
Una noche del año 25 sale Borges, con un grupo de amigos, de cierta fiesta a la que fueron invitados por una joven escritora. Mientras celebran la amenidad de la reunión y la belleza de la dueña de casa, ganan lentamente la soledad y la sombra. Uno de los incipientes poetas que acompañan a Borges, mientras orina junto a un árbol, dice que le gustaría describir de modo preciso y realista todos los vaivenes de la reunión, y también la esplendorosa persona de la dama que los había congregado. Borges acepta y completa esa aspiración literaria:
Para no omitir ningún aspecto de la realidad, debemos hacer mención de este momento… Conviene tener en cuenta todo lo que hacemos ahora… También esta prosaica ceremonia depurativa es parte del mundo… También estos orines están en el universo.
Carlos Mastronardi, Borges, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 106
Pain is an evil–all our morality implies that. Even if we have a right to forgive the universe our own pain–and I doubt if we have the right to do even this–we have certainly no right to forgive it the pain of others. We must either believe the pain inflicted for some good purpose, or condemn the universe in which it occurs.
John McTaggart, ‘The Necessity of Dogma’, International Journal of Ethics, vol. 5, no. 2 (January, 1895), p. 156
[I]n my first Voyage from Boston, being becalm’d off Block Island, our People set about catching Cod and hawl’d up a grat many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on this Occasion I consider’d with my Master Tryon, the taking every Fish a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter.– All this seem’d very reasonable.–But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, and when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc’d some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.–
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, London, 1973, pt. 1
No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death–not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!
Henry Morton Stanley, How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures, and Discoveries in Central Africa, New York, 1872, chap. 9
Since, in order to survive, we must be able to move about effectively, perception must to a certain degree achieve stable and veridical representations. It must tell us how matters stand out there. But the universe is in constant flux. We move about and other things also move. Day turns into night. Sound sources approach and recede. How can perceptual stability be achieved in the face of the ongoing flux?
We can perhaps formulate a better question by asking what aspect of the universe most needs stability. For example, is it the differences or the proportions and ratios that need to remain constant in perception? Apparently it is the proportions—the ratios. When we walk toward a house, the relative proportions of the house appear to remain constant: the triangular gable looks triangular from almost any distance. A photograph portrays the same picture whether we view it under a bright or a dim light: the ration between the light and the shaded parts of the photograph seems approximately the same even though the illumination varies. The perceived relations among the sounds of speech remain the same whether the speech is soft or highly amplified. In other words, the perceptual domain operates as though it had its own ratio requirement—not a mathematically rigid requirement, as in physics, but a practical and approximate requirement.
The usefulness of perceptual proportions and relations that remain approximately constant despite wide changes in stimulus levels is immense. Think how life as we know it would be transformed if speech could be understood at only a single level of intensity, or if objects changed their apparent proportions as they receded, or if pictures became unrecognizable when a cloud dimmed the light of the sun.
By making the perceived aspects o stimuli depend on power functions of the stimulus dimensions, nature has contrived an operating mechanism that is compatible with the need for reasonable stability among perceptual relations.
Stanley Smith Stevens, Psychophysics: Introduction to its Perceptual, Neural, and Social Prospects, New Brunswick, 1986, pp. 18-19
The more quickly people reach an understanding of negative events, the sooner they recover from them. […] Virtually all tests […], however, have examined people’s understanding of negative events. The AREA [attend, react, explain, and adapt] model is unique in predicting that explanation also leads to the diminution of affective reactions to positive events. We predict that anything that impedes explanation—such as uncertainty—should prolong affective reactions to positive events. […] These studies highlight a pleasure paradox, which refers to the fact that people have two fundamental motives—to understand the world and to maintain positive emotion—that are sometimes at odds.
Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, ‘Explaining away: A model of affective adaptation’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 3, No. 5 (September, 2008), pp. 377-378
There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it. […] [O]ne advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can’t be questioned. But how could the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery, deprivation, and injustice prevent people from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless and the only thing that really mattered was the elimination of misery, that really would be absurd.
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford, 1986, p. 217
The art of pleasing is a very necessary one to possess; but a very difficult one to acquire. It can hardly be reduced to rules; and your own good sense and observation will teach you more of it than I can. Do as you would be done by, is the surest method that I know of pleasing. Observe carefully what pleases you in others, and probably the same thing in you will please others. If you are pleased with the complaisance and attention of others to your humors, your tastes, or your weaknesses, depend upon it the same complaisance and attention, on your part to theirs, will equally please them. Take the tone of the company that you are in, and do not pretend to give it; be serious, gay, or even trifling, as you find the present humor of the company; this is an attention due from every individual to the majority. Do not tell stories in company; there is nothing more tedious and disagreeable; if by chance you know a very short story, and exceedingly applicable to the present subject of conversation, tell it in as few words as possible; and even then, throw out that you do not love to tell stories; but that the shortness of it tempted you. Of all things, banish the egotism out of your conversation, and never think of entertaining people with your own personal concerns, or private, affairs; though they are interesting to you, they are tedious and impertinent to everybody else; besides that, one cannot keep one’s own private affairs too secret. Whatever you think your own excellencies may be, do not affectedly display them in company; nor labor, as many people do, to give that turn to the conversation, which may supply you with an opportunity of exhibiting them. If they are real, they will infallibly be discovered, without your pointing them out yourself, and with much more advantage. Never maintain an argument with heat and clamor, though you think or know yourself to be in the right: but give your opinion modestly and coolly, which is the only way to convince; and, if that does not do, try to change the conversation, by saying, with good humor, “We shall hardly convince one another, nor is it necessary that we should, so let us talk of something else.”
Philip Dormer Stanhope, letter to his son, October 16, 1747
Quantities of pain or pleasure may be regarded as magnitudes having the same definiteness as tons of pig iron, barrels of sugar, bushels of wheat, yards of cotton, or pounds of wool; and as political economy seeks to ascertain the conditions under which these commodities may be produced with the greatest efficiency–so the economy of happiness seeks to ascertain the conditions under which happiness, regarded as a commodity, may be produced with the greatest efficiency.
James MacKaye, The Economy of Happiness, Boston, 1906, p. 183-184
‘Humanity’ does not exist. There are only humans, driven by conflicting needs and illusions, and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgement.
John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, London, 2002, p. 12
Women […] rarely develop sexual fetishes for objects. They do, however, develop emotional fetishes, a condition known as objectum sexualis.
Women who suffer from objectum sexualis usually claim that they are in love with an inanimate object, such as fences, a roller coaster, or a Ferris wheel. Though they sometimes have sex with the objects, their interest usually expresses itself as a powerful emotional connection and a desire for intimacy. Sometimes these feelings culminate in a romantic ceremony. One objectum sufferer name Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer marries the Berlin Wall. Another objectum sufferer, Erika Naisho, marries the Eiffel Tower. After the ceremony, she changed her name to Erika Eiffel. “There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object,” she reported sadly, “the issue of intimacy—or rather lack of it—is forever present.”
Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, New York, 2011
Ask yourself, “Will this really matter a year from now?” Chances are, the answer is no! Or try to consider your problem in the context of space and time. When my (Sonja Lyubomirsky’s) son went through an astronomy phase, I was surprised how serene and unruffled I felt every time I read him a book about galaxies, stars, or planets. How can I stress over my carpooling situation when the farthest galaxy is thirteen billion light-years away? When the universe is expanding! It seems magical that this knowledge would have such power, but it does.
Sonja Lyubomirsky and Jaime Kurtz, Positively Happy: Routes to Sustainable Happiness, Coventry: CAPP Press, 2008, p. 51
I do not wish to maintain that any strictly social animal, if its intellectual faculties were to become as active and as highly developed as in man, would acquire exactly the same moral sense as ours. In the same manner as various animals have some sense of beauty, though they admire widely-different objects, so they might have a sense of right and wrong, though led by it to follow widely different lines of conduct. If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right or wrong, or a conscience.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, London, 1871, p. 97
When I ask my expert colleagues whether I can safely accept Eddington’s conclusions in these matters, they always answer in the negative. But this does not satisfy me. For I am quite convinced that their unfavourable answer is not based on a first-hand study of the arguments. It is quite plain that their attitude may be summed up in the sentence: “This kind of thing must be wrong somewhere; but I can’t be expected to waste my valuable time in finding out precisely where the mistake lies.”
C. D. Broad, ‘Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Philosophy of Physical Science’, Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 59 (1940), p. 312
This is how scientists do things. We can’t always claim that our methods are better than what came before, but we can do things differently and see if we come to the same answer. If we come to a different answer, then that raises the issue of why. And then we can address the issue.
Richard Muller, ‘I Stick to the Science’, Scientific American, vol. 304, no. 6 (June, 2011), p. 68
His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. `What then?’Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. `What then?’All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
‘What then?’ sang Plato’s ghost. `What then?’‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,
‘According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought’;
But louder sang that ghost, `What then?’
William Butler Yeats, ‘What then?’ (1939)
Moral false-positives (failing to recognize an unethical behavior as unethical) are probably more costly than false-negatives (failing to recognize an ethical behavior as ethical). But moral false-negatives are costly, too.
Hugh Ristik, LessWrong (February 8, 2011),
We like people who help us, and we help people we life. However, in terms of favours, it is surprising how little it takes for us to like a person, and how much we give on the basis of so little. It seems that if you want to help yourself, you should help others first.
Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, London, 2009, p. 75
Researchers have spent a great deal of time looking at the link between people’s scores on these types of questionnaires and happiness. The findings are as consistent as they are worrying –high scores tend to be associated with feeling unhappy and unsatisfied with life. Of course, this is not the case with every single materialist and so, if you did get a high score, you might be one of the happy-go-lucky people who buck the trend. (However, before assuming this, do bear in mind that research also suggests that whenever we are confronted with negative results from tests, we are exceptionally good at convincing ourselves that we are an exception to the rule.)
Richard Wiseman, 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot, London, 2009, pp. 25-26
If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and they would not distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.
Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, New York, 2008, p. 72
Two high school seniors sharing a pizza, judging the practicality and morality of anarcho-capitalism—it doesn’t get any better.
Bryan Caplan, ‘An Intellectual Autobiography’, In Walter Block (ed.), I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians (Auburn, Alabama, 2010), p. 75