Michael Shermer Quotes
Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
Quotes to Explore
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We all have our strengths and our failings.
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My dad was in the military, yeah. He was in the Air Force, and he was a doctor, so he would go places for six months here, and two years there. And I was home-schooled because I played the violin, and I did a lot of competitions.
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I shall always be a priest of love.
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A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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War criminals in the U.S. and Israel are not punished: no international court has the courage to put them on trial.
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I think management and technology all come into play in building a super-yacht. It is a challenge - a serious challenge.
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Sometimes the storyline is as simple as, 'We're just going to be the best, and we're going for the championships.
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You always learn something from mistakes.
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I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.
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We must believe in free will, we have no choice.
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I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s - progressive and an atheist.
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I am very shy with people I don't know.
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There is no health without mental health; mental health is too important to be left to the professionals alone, and mental health is everyone's business.
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Sports saved my life.
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I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.
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You don't get as invested in someone in 90 minutes as you do over 13 hours of television show.
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Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us; but most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.
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Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.
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Television is now the dominant factor in the lives of too many American children.
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People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.
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Well, many of us believe that excessive media concentration is a subject that ought to be addressed, and it is, of course, the intention of the majority party not to allow that to be discussed.
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To be a good musician, you need to give people what they want, what they need.
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Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
