Brains Quotes
More Brains Quotes
The difference between a fast bowler and a good fast bowler is not extra muscle but extra brains.
Fred (Frederick Sewards) Trueman— 1964 FreddieTrueman's Book of Cricket.
It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.
robert heilbroner— Chapter IX, John Maynard Keynes, p. 240
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.
dr. seuss— Oh, the Places You'll Go, by Dr. Seuss (1990, pg. 2)
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
shirley abbott— p. 1 (opening lines)
With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!
louise burfitt-dons— Video message sent to Joe Biden in response to his suggestions for green jobs (2009)
If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.
john buchan— Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"
American housewives have not had their brains shot away, nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror.
betty friedan— Ch 13 "The Forfeited Self"
My mother always told me the best way to learn to deal with a man was to learn to ride a mule. She said they have about equal brains most of the time. Sometimes the mule is smarter.
robert jordan— The Wheel of Time #2: The Great Hunt (1991)
Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably rather little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.
roger wolcott sperry— "Evolution of the Human Brain" (1964), p. 2
Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.
nassim nicholas taleb— p. 105 (The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010))
For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, thememoryof Macaulay, thefigure of Juno, and thehide of a rhinoceros.
Ethel Barrymore— Quoted in George Jean Nathan The Theatre in the Fifties (1953).
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
— c.1920 Attributed.
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
Robert Louis Stevenson— 1881Virginibus Puerisque,'Crabbed Age andYouth'.
No statesman e'er will find it worth his painsTo tax our labours and excise our brains.
Charles Churchill— Night, an Epistle to Robert Lloyd (1761), line 271.
Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease.
cormac mccarthy— page 4 (Suttree (1979))
There must be ever present in our minds the fundamental truth that in a republic such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for nor against any man because he is rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another, because he works with his brains or because he works with his hands.
theodore roosevelt— (1903) A Square Deal
What you hope for Is that at some point of the pointless journey, Indoors or out, and when you least expect it, Right in the middle of your stride, like that, So neatly that you never feel a thing, The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead And blow your brains out.
Richard Wilbur— "Walking to Sleep" (1969)
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
Richard Dawkins— Ch. 5: The Replication Bomb
Robert Arctor halted. Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none.
philip kindred dick— Chapter 2 (p. 26)
So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.
thomas henry huxley— Ch.2, p.120
All of them, all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop.
cesare pavese— Chapter 4, p. 26
According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.
steven pinker— p. 44, emphasis added
He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.
neal stephenson— Chapter 22 (Zodiac (1988))
I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... "Betrayal"... "Confrontation"... "Management"... My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.
tom stoppard— Milne, Act I
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson— Robert Louis Stevenson, Crabbed Age.
Nothing is easier than fault-finding. No talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, is required to set up in the grumbling business. But those that are moved by a genuine desire to do good have little time for murmuring or complaint.
— Robert West, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 420.
Once we know what we need to do, our nanotechnologies should enable us to construct replacement bodies and brains that won't be constrained to work at the crawling pace of "real time." The events in our computer chips already happen millions of times faster than those in brain cells. Hence, we could design our "mind-children" to think a million times faster than we do. To such a being, half a minute might seem as long as one of our years, and each hour as long as an entire human lifetime.
— Marvin Minsky (1994) Will Robots Inherit the Earth? in Scientific American
