Some thing to think about

What Scares you more?

- by Mythili Vutukuru

Being blown up to pieces in an airplane midair,

Or spending New Year's eve alone in your rocking chair?

Dying from disease at an age very young,

Or living a long life, yet ending up nameless and unsung?

Getting laid off at work with four mouths to feed,

Or getting paid less than a friend who has not your fancy degree?

The vagaries and randomness of the world around,

Or the voices in your head that never let you sleep sound?

• Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

• Abdul Kalam: A dream is not what you get in sleep, but the one that does not let you sleep
• Jhumpa Lahiri: Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
• Jacob Braude: Always behave like a duck - keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle with great vigour underneath.
• Hans Margolius: Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
• Søren Kierkegaard: Life can only be understood looking backward, but it must be lived forward.
• Marcel Proust: The real voyage of discovery is not in making new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
• Bertrand Russell
  • A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
  • Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
  • Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise
  • The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.
• Descartes : Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well endowed with it.
• Aaron Sorkin (in the voice of Issac Jaffe): But mostly because if you feel that strongly about something, you have a responsibility to try and change my mind!

Communist until you get rich. Feminist until you get married. Atheist until your plane starts falling.

• Joseph Joubert : The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
• Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman: When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice/ It is better to be prone to pessimism, by expecting the worst, one cannot be disappointed.
• Popper
  • A discussion which you win but which fails to help you change or to clarify your mind at least a little should be regarded as sheer loss.
  • Serious critical decisions are always difficult... Many participants in a rational, that is, a critical, discussion find it particularly difficult to unlearn what their instincts seem to teach them (and what they are taught, incidentally, by every debating society): that is to win. For what they have to learn is that victory in debate is nothing, while even slightest clarification of one's problem - even the smallest contribution made towards a clearer understanding of one's own position or that of one's opponent is a great success.
• John Tabak, in the book Numbers: It is not easy to appreciate just how difficult and how interesting counting can be. Counting is deceptive. It is easy to count that a child can learn to do it, but ease in counting is a fairly recent development. Throughout most of human history counting was done by specialists because counting was hard work. It took thousands of years to develop the counting system that we use today
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in the book Fooled by Randomness
  • For me, history is of use merely at the level of my desired sensibility, affecting the way I would wish to reference past events, by being able to better steal the ideas from others and leverage them, correct the mental defect that seems to block my ability to learn from others.
  • I am just intelligent enough to understand that I have a pre-disposition to be fooled by randomness- and to accept that I am rather emotional. I am dominated by my emotions- but an aesthete, I am happy about that fact. I am just like every single character whom I ridiculed in this book. Not only that, but I may be even worse than them because there may be negative correlation between beliefs and behavior. The difference between myself and those I ridicule is that I try to be aware of it. No matter how long I study and understand probability, my emotions will respond to a different set of calculations, those that my unintelligent genes want me to handle. If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot.
• Plato: Monarchy, the rule of one good man, and tyranny, the distorted form of monarchy; Aristocracy, the rule of a few good men, and oligarchy, its distorted form; Democracy, the rule of the many, of all the people. Democracy did not have two forms. For the many always formed a rabble, and so democracy was distorted in itself.
• Vladimir Nabokov: One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.
• Harry Stack Sullivan: When the satisfaction or security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. ... Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term
• Vannevar Bush (Shannon's Adviser): In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin. Men of our profession — we teachers — are bound to be impressed with the tendency of youths of strikingly capable minds to become interested in one small corner of science and uninterested in the rest of the world. . . . It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell.