A.J. Jacobs Quotes

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

Fashion is such a fairytale and it is such a fantasy. And it's about metamorphosis and sort of changing yourself and playing a part that you want people to see.

Scrabble - The game is available in Braille. That’s a nice fact. This makes me feel better about humanity for some reason. I can’t really explain why.

No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.

I believe that anything can be for men or women. I mean, I've worn a lace dress before!

Sometimes I miss hamburgers, I should say that. I miss the tuna pizzas at Mercer Kitchen.

I'd like to believe that the women who wear my clothes are not dressing for other people, that they're wearing what they like and what suits them. It's not a status thing.

It's the things that aren't accepted as conventionally beautiful that I find more attractive.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

I don't think there is ever a wrong time for a polka dot.

One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

More people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving.

Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?

To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.

I am a perfect being in a perfect world.

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

There's money, and then there's class. The two are often separated.

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

We all wish there were more 'Bridesmaids' out there.

Any opportunity to adorn oneself is human, and accessories are an easy way to do it.

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.

But the customer is the final, final filter. What survives the whole process is what people wear. I'm not interested in making clothes that end up in some dusty museum.

A great measure of a man is how he reacts to a midnight awakening when there's no fire or burglar in sight.

I like to make things. I like making choices, choosing colours, evoking a spirit, a change.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

Very little strength can produce much motion of air. Learn about air as motion.

Better to live your life open rather than exist on borrowed time, waiting for the great unmasking.

Makeup is the finishing touch, the final accessory.

I really do believe that art changes the landscape of the world.

observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.

I'm a very boring person in my real life so I got to act out misbehaving fantasies was really fun.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Life isn't a straightforward climb up the ladder. It can take a few slips to really gain perspective.

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.

For so many years, I felt so insecure, so inferior, and I still have those moments, but I have a newfound confidence since I got in shape and changed my diet.

I love to take things that are everyday and comforting and make them into the most luxurious things in the world.

Creativity in any form stimulates creativity in every form, music, arts, literature... I find inspiration in anything. It's all the same.

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.

When God made up this world of ours, He made it long and wide, And meant that it should shelter all, And none should be denied.