“Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood.”— Owase Jeelani
The quote archive
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
Within each of us is a deep, complex network of capillaries, veins and arteries which extend a distance equivalent to more than 3 times the circumference of the Earth, and because our body has lost its conditioning to nature, our hearts have to pump 20-30 times a minute more than if we regularly exposed our body to cold water.
— Wim HofExtreme athlete known for ice exposure & breathing technique methods
We come from mammals, we are mammals… we're just mammals that wear clothes. We're destimulated – we don't feel the cold, the heat, everything in our environment – even though our physiology is built for it. Our vascular system responds naturally to temperature changes by dilating and contracting our muscles; but we've allowed them to lose this fitness, to lose their conditioning – and so our hearts compensate.
— Wim HofExtreme athlete known for ice exposure & breathing technique methods
It is precisely because of all those years of anticipating and designing for failure that they are alive today.
— Chris HadfieldCanadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
Going around the world thousands of times presents you with the depth, fragility, strength and richness of Earth; and gives you a sense of what 4.5 billion years actually means. I travelled with our Earth as it crossed the Solar System and watched as Winter and Summer swapped- it was like watching the world take one of 4.5 billion breaths.
— Chris HadfieldCanadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
Seeing the Earth from space gives you an unfiltered understanding of it. Until you see the Earth from this vantage point, everything you knew about the planet was based on something that someone else had told you – based on their own filtered understanding and bias.
— Chris HadfieldCanadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
Most every decision that your team will make is independent of you as a leader. Once in a while, they may update you or ask you a question, but the vast majority of decisions are made either individually, or inside teams- and if those individuals and teams don't know what that end-game truly looks like, the odds of them making the right decision at any moment in time diminishes.
— Chris HadfieldCanadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
99.9% of the time, you are not in a burning building- and that is precisely the time to think about what you would do in that 0.1% of time when it is on fire. A lack of information and preparedness in an emergency or crisis can be the difference between carrying yourself through, and sometimes, catastrophic outcomes.
— Chris HadfieldCanadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
Having a plan, feeling confident and being competent are the greatest antidotes to fear. If you're just trying to deal with the unknown by crossing your fingers and hoping, you will be utterly helpless when a situation finally manifests. In reality, you're rarely (if ever) completely helpless, you allow yourself to be helpless.
— Chris HadfieldCanadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
In postmodernism, there are no absolute truths; everything is relative, of course other than the one absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. This is a form of intellectual terrorism, nihilism.
— Gad SaadEvolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research
Everything we do in one sense or another is consummatory. We consume religious narratives, we consume literature, we consume friendships. Our mate choices are the ultimate form of consumer choice.
— Gad SaadEvolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research
The main currency on our campuses has become the management of hurt feelings.
— Gad SaadEvolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research
It takes intellectuals to come up with some of the most moronic ideas possible.
— Gad SaadEvolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research
Humans can be parasitized by actual brain worms, but also by idea pathogens that cause them to behave in profoundly maladaptive ways.
— Gad SaadEvolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research
I can't advertise chewing gum to my children because it's unethical, but I can feed them all sorts of narratives that will have a profound impact on their personal trajectories. It's quite an extraordinarily hypocritical position.
— Gad SaadEvolutionary Psychologist & Author Known for Consumer Behavior Research
If Leonardo Da Vinci could somehow be transported to the present, he would be blown away by the level of knowledge that's available to all of us by a simple press of a key. It follows that we all have the opportunity to be on the level of Da Vinci or Franklin because we all have access to so many different forms of knowledge.
— Robert GreeneAuthor of "The 48 Laws of Power" & Strategist
I want you to not deny your shadow, your darkest impulses, but to find ways to use them and turn them into something productive. We ought to take that ambition, those aggressive impulses, and channel them into our work, into great causes, into justice.
— Robert GreeneAuthor of "The 48 Laws of Power" & Strategist