Worthwhile Sentences on Writing

From Hugh Hollowell: "The thing about founding a nonprofit is that, eventually, all your dreams turn into paperwork."

From Justin Landwehr: "Words are the waste products of our experiences."

From David Foster Wallace: "Writers have a queer blend of shyness and exhibitionism."

From Brene Brown: "Maybe stories are just data with a soul."

From Mark Twain: “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”

Worthwhile Sentences on Relationships

From Justin Landwehr: "Maybe I don’t want to care about impressing you, but I sure as hell want you to care about impressing me"

From economist Al Roth: "Let’s just say that marriage is a dynamic game that you play over a lifetime."

From the Simple Dollar: "The trick to a good presentation is to realize that the audience mostly just wants for the presentation to be over so they can do other things"

From Leela Turanga Turanga Leela: "Society is never gonna make any progress until we all learn to pretend to like each other."

From Anna Jonathan Franzen: “Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.”

Worthwhle Sentences on Complexity

From F.A. Hayk: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”

From Hugh Hollowell: "rules are what we use when we don’t want to take the time to discover the specifics of the given situation."

From Shadi Hamid: "The true test of being anti-torture is opposing it even when it works"

From Jonah Lehrer: "We are affiliation machines, editing the world to confirm our partisan ideologies."

From Conan O'Brien: “There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized”

Worthwhile Sentences on Interventionism

From Mark Zuckerberg: "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa."

From Tate Watkins: "What if an international peacekeeping force had descended into Charleston after Confederate troops bombarded Fort Sumter?"

From Planet Money: "Has any single human being, either directly or indirectly, cost the United States more money than Osama bin Laden?"

From John Mueller and Mark Stewart: "The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars."

From Paul Valery: “Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.”

Worthwhile Sentences on Work

From Sallie James: "Oh sure, you can pass lots of laws to creates jobs. You could pass a law saying we can no longer use computers. You can pass a law saying no more use of heavy earth moving equipment; we should all use spoons."

From Bryan Caplan: "In a society of Einsteins, Einsteins take out the garbage, scrub floors, and wash dishes."

From Tim Ferriss' email auto response: "Thank you for your email. Sadly, it will be deleted. To regain sanity, I am taking a break from e-mail until March. If still relevant, please email me again in the month of March."

From David Brooks: "One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work."

From former UC President Clark Kerr: "The chancellor's job had come to be defined as providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni."

Worthwhile Sentences on Misconceptions

From Anthony Randazzo: "It means you're not going to buy a home, until you can afford to buy a home. During the housing bubble we didn't see home ownership rates rise. We just saw really cheap quasi-rental...they didn't really ever own that home."

From Larry Summers: "I was struck by the extent to which the U.S. bonds were a flight-to-quality asset even in a global financial crisis in which the United States was at the epicenter."

From Jimmy Kimmel: "I realize that I am ignorant when it comes to this sort of thing, but isn't conducting an orchestra basically air guitar for rich people?"

From Ross Douthat: "The problem is that this isn’t how the President has sold the board to the public: Instead, he’s promised that it will only reduce “unnecessary spending,” which is basically the equivalent of a Republican promising to keep the entitlement system solvent by reducing Medicare fraud."

From Sheldon Richman: "Schools, by their structure, are preparing kids for some sort of authoritarian lifestyle"

From Ladies' Home Journal in 1918: "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."

Worthwhile Sentences on Feedback

From Hugh Hollowell: "Everyone always loves you when you don't tell them the truth."

From Hans Rosling: "My basic idea is that the world has changed so much, what people need isn't more data but a new mindset."

From Laura Morrison: "first, be self-aware enough to understand when your motives aren't genuine or when they're manipulative, and second, rather than manipulate people to get what you want, why not instead live honestly and directly communicate to others what you want from them?"

From Jonah Lehrer on good ADHD: "When we don't know where to look, we need to look everywhere."

From Magician Franz Harary: "If you can understand how people think, then, for a brief moment, you can control what they see."

Worthwhile Sentences on Death

From the oldest federal judge in the country: "At this age, I'm not even buying green bananas."

From Justin Scott: "either you cannot bear the idea of a horrific earthquake in Japan (or Haiti, or China) with God, or you cannot bear it without him."

From The Atlantic: "And they never—and I mean never—ask the critical Kantian question: what if everyone in the world consumed these supposedly sustainable alternatives to conventional food?"

From Oprah Winfrey: ‎"Forgiveness is letting go of the hope that the past can be changed."

From Justin Landwehr: "Life is too short to spend it doing things that you wish would hurry up and end."

Update: From Harry Houdini: “Nobody wants to see a man die, but everyone wants to be there when it happens.”

Worthwhile Sentences on Practical Politics

From Jerry Bowyer: "What works are societies governed according to principles that conform to the iron laws of human nature"

From David Brooks: "Seniors vote. Taxpayers revolt...The future has no union."

From Mitch Daniels: "Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers."

From Tyler Cowen: "I prefer a situation where each prisoner costs the state government a good deal."

From R.R. Reno: "The expansion of political responsibility beyond a certain point would absorb our private lives, a result that entails the opposite of what most people intend when they endorse political liberty."

Worthwhile Sentences on Thinking

From George Orwell: People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."

From Victor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

From The New Yorker (about Harry Potter): "That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic"

From homosexual pastor Mel White: "Even when we believe the Scriptures are 'infallible' or 'without error,' it's terribly dangerous to think that our understanding of every biblical text is also without error."

From Abraham Lincoln: "The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine."

Worthwhile Sentences on Defense

From the Boston Globe:  "It seems sensible to make every effort to enlist the body's own ability to heal itself—which is what, at bottom, placebos seem to do"

From Doug Bandow: "Indeed, today the military does almost everything except defend the United States."

From Nassim Taleb: "Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it."

From Billy Graham's wife when asked if she had ever considered divorce: "Divorce? No. Murder? Yes."

From long dead economist Frederic Bastiat: "When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."

Worthwhile Sentences on Political Commentary

From moderate David Brooks: "Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage."

From the Economic Logician: "Many see the Great Recession, as it is now called, as a dual crisis: an economic crisis and a crisis of economics, and more specifically macroeconomics."

From Professor of Shakespeare Peter Saccio: "Shakespeare and Sarah Palin have two things in common. One, they both tend to make up words. Two, half the country can't understand what the other half of the country thinks is so great about them."

From the Seattle Times: "There are no small-government disciples in massive oil spills."

From New York Magazine: "If you can't beat it, the thinking goes, yell at it."

Worthwhile Sentences on Charity

From Mother Teresa: “If I look at the masses I will never act, but if I look at the one I will."

From  Liz Lemon: "words are the first step on the way to deeds"

From Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: "it's harder to be kind than clever"

From the Boston Globe: "My argument is that the cause of poverty has been poverty."

From Robert A. Heinlein: "Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

From previous worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Waste

From The Independent: "air conditioning guzzles 15 per cent of total American energy consumption"

From Stephen Dubner: "If you don’t miss a plane now and then you’re spending too much time in airports."

From Twitter: "i've found smartphones increase the opportunity cost of driving, tilt toward public trans."

From The Economist: "The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.”

From historian Louis Menand: “War is specially terrible not because it destroys human beings, who can be destroyed in plenty of other ways, but because it turns human beings into destroyers."

From previous worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Success

From Alan Reynolds: "Successful people are not docile sheep just waiting to be shorn."

From Dan Pink: "Most people are more frightened of failure than of mediocrity. It should be the reverse."

From David Brooks: "Every move is a partial failure, to be corrected by the next one."

From the Economic Logician: "But not everyone is a good entrepreneur, and encouraging this too much leads some people to become entrepreneurs while they would have been more productive as employees."

From Tracy Morgan: "I like a strong woman, but weak enough to need me."

From previous worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Suggestions

From Science Daily: "The idea that simply being more supportive is better for your marriage is a myth. Often husbands and wives think, 'If my partner really knows me and loves me, he or she will know I'm upset and will know how to help me.'"

From Tyler Cowen: "check the non-fiction Return carts, to see what other people have been reading."

From Clay Shirky: "Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity"

From Steve Landsburg: "As any historian could tell you, no society has every pulled itself out of poverty without putting its children to work."

From Bryan Buckley (privately in response the previous article): "Just because you have good intentions doesn't mean you're doing something noble."

From Justin Wehr: "Treat your world view as nothing more than a default position -- a starting point from which to assimilate contradictory evidence."

From previous worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Perspective

From Justin Wehr: "Test for whether you truly understand something: Can you explain it to a 10 year old?"

From Scott Sumner: "Happiness isn’t based on anything you achieve, but rather the anticipation of future happiness."

From ScienceDaily: "people who achieve greater social status are more likely to be able to experience life as rewarding and stimulating because they have more targets for dopamine to act upon"

From Eric Barker: "If you're a natural Casanova are you likely to be less ambitious?"

From Tara Parker-Pope: "Vacations do make people happy, but we found people who are anticipating holiday trips show signs of increased happiness, and afterward there is hardly an effect.”

*Past worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Economic Problems

From True/Slant: "about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year."

From the Freakonomics Blog: "Assuming all 5.5 trillion cigarettes produced around the world each year get smoked, smokers produce 84,878 tons of particulate air pollution annually — about half the pollution put out by all the cars in America."

From Matt Yglesias: "Why are we spending a multiple of Afghanistan’s total GDP on fighting a war in the country?" and "Couldn't more be done, for cheaper, with cash for bribes and development?"

From Tyler Cowen: "We no longer have an independent central bank in this country, at least not for the time being."

From Thomas Jefferson: "I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

*Past worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Understanding

From Bryan Caplan: "Linking views you don't like with Hitler is of course the ultimate political cheap shot. But as an economist, I don't mind buying cheap, especially if the quality is good."

From Oliver Stone: "You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate.”

From Smart Money: if we actually buy a green product, we appear to take it as license to act like jerks."

From the Meteuphoric blog: nothing makes an activity feel safe like a gargantuan authority calmly informing me of the risks of it. If the government’s advertising something, everyone knows about it, and if there’s no panic or banning, it’s probably safe.

From The Browser: "White liberals champion green values partly as a substitute for religion, which has largely lost its grip on them"

*Past worthwhile sentences.

Worthwhile Sentences on Life

From Ben Casnocha: "be intense about things that matter, super laid back about everything else."

From the WWF: "Of all the species that have lived on the Earth since life first appeared here 3 billion years ago, only about one in a thousand is still living today."

From Carl Jung: "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

From Seth Spearman: "Marriage as an instittuion has a profound capacity for producing amazing happiness but also the deepest and bitterest soul-crushing misery."

From Justin Wehr's friend Bob: "Feelings are tools for understanding information we get. Our interpretation of them is both influenced by and contributes to our model of the Universe."

*Past worthwhile sentences.