Robert M Quotes

We all seek out stress. We hate the wrong kinds of stress but when it's the right kind, we love it - we pay good money to be stressed by a scary movie, a roller coaster ride, a challenging puzzle.

I'm a big advocate of drones.

No policy has proved more successful in making friends for the United States, during the cold war and since, than educating students from abroad at our colleges and universities.

Whenever we begin to feel as if we can no longer go on, HOPE whispers in our ear to remind us that we are strong.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

What does the frontal cortex do? Gratification postponement, executive function, long-term planning, and impulse control. Basically, it makes you do the harder thing.

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with quality.

Who needs Satan when you have a God like this?

This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault.

That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.

Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive

New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.

If a rat is a good model for your emotional life, you're in big trouble.

What happened in the milliseconds before a behavior to cause it? That's in the neurobiological realm.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

I have tried to maintain civil relationships with everyone I meet - and, even if I violently disagree with them, try to be respectful.

Schools vast factories for the manufacture of robots.

I choose not to place "DIS," in my ability.

The frontal cortex doesn't even fully develop until age 25, which is wild!

Perhaps most excitingly, we are uncovering the brain basis of our behaviors - normal, abnormal and in-between. We are mapping a neurobiology of what makes us us.

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies.

In the crowd, herd, or gang, it is a mass-mind that operates-which is to say, a mind without subtlety, a mind without compassion, a mind, finally, uncivilized.

A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.

How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.

Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty.

I've been very sensitive for a long time to the repeated pattern, during economic hard times or after a war, of the United States' essentially unilaterally disarming.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah; which is to demean one's self.

The best education for the best is the best education for all.

Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.

A man is not wealthy simply by the contents of his pockets alone, but instead by the richness of his heart.

Being born with a disability, can sometimes be a struggle, but it is the ability to overcome such a challenge, that makes it so worth the fight. NEVER GIVE UP!!!

College football: I do not see the relationship of those highly industrialized affairs on Saturday afternoons to higher learning in America.

I'm just a man on a mission, to prove my disability hasn't won

My disability has opened my eyes to see my true abilities.

To find equality for mankind, we must first remove the barriers that have divided us for so long.

Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.

Some Poor grad student pressing on the flanks of a hamster and out comes a doctorate on the other side

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.

The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

Future U.S. political leaders – those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me – may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

One of my favorite little sayings is, 'To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.