Robert M Quotes

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.

If you run from technology, it will chase you.

Almost always, genes are about potentials and vulnerabilities rather than about determinism.

To out-group-members, oxytocin makes you crappier - less cooperative and more preemptively aggressive. It's not the luv hormone. It's the in-group parochialism/xenophobia hormone.

The born-again gospel promises joy and peace of mind, but it does so by prolonging childhood.

For those who are going to learn from books, learning the art of reading would seem to be indispensable.

It doesn't matter which side of the tracks your from, the train still rolls the same.

I don't have a dis-ability, I have a different-ability.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

Well, I've ruffled a few feathers at all the institutions I've led. But I think that's part of leadership.

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.

Get it wrong, and we call it a cult. Get it right, in the right time and the right place, and maybe, for the next few millennia, people won't have to go to work on your birthday.

If you care about your longevity and health, be a socially affiliated baboon who is better than high-ranking ones at walking away from provocations.

I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.

Oxytocin is lauded for how it promotes warmth, generosity, social bonding, cooperation, trust, and compassion.

That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.

Now I look beyond what I can't do and focus on what I CAN.

As a disabled man, let my life be a reflection of the endless amount of ability that exists in each and everyone of us.

Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.

We call Japanese soldiers fanatics when they die rather than surrender, whereas American soldiers who do the same thing are called heroes.

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.

More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife - and watch TV.

...The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

A single man of one, only pebbles can be moved, but many men together, stands no mountain that can't move.

Never take more out of life, than you intend to give back.

I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles

Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.

I'm chasing my dreams straight to the top - into a sky that has no limits.

It is not the tempest, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but the still small voice of the Spirit that carries on the glorious work of saving souls.

You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.

Most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.

I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.

I've always followed the rule that anything worth doing is worth doing excessively.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

The fascinating thing about our best and worst behaviors isn't the behavior itself - the brain tells the muscles to do something or other - big deal. It's the meaning of the behavior.

It's great to have a buff frontal cortex to do that harder thing - for example, help a person in need rather buy some useless, shiny gee-gaw.

Fundamentalism fills you with answers before you even think to ask the questions.

Only humans invent moralizing gods who monitor our behavior.

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things.

So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell...is it?

Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.'

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

Quality tends to fan out like waves.

The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.

No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.

A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.