#mic

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genocide #ideology #politics #society #terrorism

But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#politics #age

When I grow up I want to be an old woman. ↗

— Michelle Shocked

#getting-old #getting-older #michelle-shocked #old-woman #age

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears. ↗

— Patricia McCormick

#sold #music

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter. ↗

— Edward Shorter

#history #psychiatry #age

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes. ↗

— John Kenneth Galbraith

#age

Some places will, however, be left behind. Not every city will succeed, because not every city has been adept at adapting to the age of information, in which ideas are the ultimate creator of wealth. ↗

— Edward Glaeser

#economics #ideas #age

Ogling Douglas' wife, who looked trampily deep into bipolar meds & high-end anti-aging crêmes, Jerzy thought: Now that is a hot fuck. He wondered if Douglas got his C by being wayback viral throatstroked by papilloma.....seems like a person would have to go down on a boatload of broads to get HPV in the gullet (well, do the math), if the actor scarfed half as much pussy as dimpled dad kirk-King Leer, Kirk the lyin' King-then he just might have qualified. ↗

— Bruce Wagner

#michael-douglas #age

Anger is an agro-chemical that makes self-destruction to grow faster. Like a stone thrown upward, all angry people eventually fall down into the dirty ditch of sorrowful self-harm and a pathetic loss of real-self. ↗

— Israelmore Ayivor

#anger #fall #fertilizer #grow #real-self

I went to school in drag, in art school and my day was completely different because everybody thought I was a chick. You should see me as a chick. So I went as a girl, as like an experiment and it worked really well and everyone was really nice to me but I couldn't talk obviously...you know train conductors were really cool to me on my commute...HA! I looked hot as a chick! ↗

— Gerard Way

#chicks #drag #frank #hot #iero