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Here are my notes from The R. Crumb Handbook.

• p10 There's only one country in the world where a person could get away with expressin' theirself as freely as I do! ... an' that's right here in th' good ol' U.S.A., and don't choo forget it! So when I tear down dis country an' criticize our society, remember I do it with love!
• p12 "I want to give you a piece of advice about fame," the master said as we were about to begin the interviews. "You should get down on your knees and thank the baby Jesus every day that you are on your side of the microphone and not on mine. Think about it!"
• p18 The spread of slums, the hypergrowth and congestion of manufacturing cities, the noise and stench of the industrial process, debased urban life all over the western world and led to a great yearning from escape ... in America, with its superabundance of cheap land, simple property laws, social mobility, mania for profit, zest for practical invention, and bible drunk sense of history, the yearning to escape industrialism expressed itself as a renewed search for Eden. America reinvented that paradise, described so briefly and vaguely in the book of Genesis, called it suburbia, and put it up for sale.
• p25 My father talked about being a kid on the farm and going out hunting and doing things connected with earth. Real stuff that kids of his generation had to deal with, life and death stuff. We barely had contact with real world. We were silly, wimpy, suburban kids playing games inspired by movies, television, and comic books. For us it was all filtered through the mass media. We were children of the media, the first TV generation.
• p28 It's strange to think of our fathers going to war. The glory of war is as old as the human race. You prove your manhood by going out and fighting another tribe, being a brave warrior. Get out there and prove yourself - kill somebody!
• p54 Everybody off camera was sleazy and stressed out.
• p56 Mass media is a fairly recent development, only as old as the Industrial Revolution, and it is spreading over the whole world and turning the last proud, independent, tribal population into consumers. We are products of this industrial commodity culture. It's hard to make a value judgment about it, but certainly the world wasn't always like this.
• p132 I was relieved when it was finally over, but I also immediately missed the egoless state of that strange interlude. LSD put me someplace else. I wasn't sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing, I'm not sure.
• p142 I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody else.
• p164 I would work at night when the ne'er-do-wells were sleeping, then I could get something done. But that was part of the hippie lifestyle. If you had a house, you couldn't turn people away who needed a place to "crash." And they would stay for six months and just hang out! I didn't have the courage, the nerve, to kick people out. Eventually, the wife had to be the ogre and do the hard thing. I couldn't do it, I was too weak.
• p180 All the people who work in the commercial culture are part of a conspiracy against the average man to get his money. They are not concerned with what effect their product might ultimately have, physically or spiritually. They are always looking for the lowest common denominator, the broadest possible market. They don't care what that might be. If Jesus movies are putting butts in theater seats, they'll make Jesus movies. If ultraviolence appeals to a certain segment of the population, the butchers are happy to provide it for them. Basically, the commercial media culture is a cold, merciless mechanism that is there to feed money to the people who perpetuate it. Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The esthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time - i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human lavel, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland.
• p210 I was a fool. There is something in us that us always looking for the hard-to-find ultimate experience. We wade through a lot of shit to get to the fulfilment of our dreams.
• p217 Deprivation enhances the desired object - every desired object! If heaven meant having everything you desired in life, whenever you wanted it, eventually it would become meaningless. And then what? Where do yo go from there? What do we really want? What is this yearning, this "fire in our bellies?"
• p217 When my daughter Sophie was born in 1981, I changed. I became more conservative. I believe in law, order, stability! You gotta have it for the protection of the children!
• p227 "That means you think I'm too emotional, loud, obnoxious, spoiled, insensitive + pushy!" "No I don't sugar! HONEST"
• p243 Drawing became a way to win admiring oohs and ahhs from adults - mostly women, come to think og it - my mother, various female teachers, etc. My father's praise was always qualified, tempered with little criticisms or suggestions. And then, too, I always and ever had a big ego. Where does that come from? Damned if I know, ..., I think I was born with it... and I was a dreamer, shy, socially awkward, always... an odd ball, even in early childhood... then I was drawn into the comicbook thing by my older brother... He called himself a "failed mystic".
• p251 It was already obvious to us that comics had been in decline since the early 1950s. In any case, most cartoonists have about a ten year of inspiration or creativity. After that they begin to burn out from the relentlessness of churning out comics on a regular basis. They are totally locked into their contract, their standard living, their family responsibilities. They're forced to keep producing, like it or not.
• p297 Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.
• p343 Ahh the scum of the earth, those are my people.
• p363 My generation comes from a world that has been molded by crass TV programs, movies, comic books, popular music, advertisements and commercials. My brain is a huge garbage dump of all this stuff and it is this, mainly, that my works comes out of, for better or for worse.
• p375 The purpose of human life is to increase awareness. --Carlos Castaneda
• p394 For me, the most profound confrontation with death I ever experienced took place in 1966 after ingesting a powerful dose of LSD. I don't remember precisely what it was that terrified me, because at that moment I told myself that if I ever wanted to be sane again, I ahd to forget what I saw. I forced amnesia on myself so that I could return to the normal world. Bummer, man ... With LSD, you don't have to kill or be killed ... it all happens on some other plane of existence.
• p394 My work has a strong negative element. I have my own inner demons to deal with. Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside mself that I can't otherwise grasp.
• p394 Isn't it strange that we are such a mystery to ourselves?
• p396 This world is always going to be bigger and more powerful than you are, but you've got to deal with it. Life is active struggle. As Rocky says, "I know I can't beat this guy, I just wanna go the distance with him. I just wanna still be standing at the end of the fight, that's all..." That's the only victory you can hope for. You've got to figure out a way to stay in shape, and stay alert, to keep standing.
• p398 There's a wealth of great music recorded in the 78 era, before the onslaught of mass media profoundly changed everything ... forever!

Here are my notes from book How to analyze people on sight:

• It's not how much you know but what you can DO that counts.
• The most essential thing in the world to any individual is to understand himself. The next is to understand the other fellow. For life is largely a problem of running your own car as it was built to be run, plus getting along with the other drivers on the highway.
• The game is the same old game--you must adjust and adapt yourself to your environment or it will destroy you.
• Adapt or Die - Who will win? Nature answers for you. She has said with awful and inexorable finality that, whether you are a blade of grass on the Nevada desert or a man in the streets of London, you can win only as you adapt yourself to your environment.
• The moving picture industry--said to be the third largest in the world--is based largely on this interrelation. This industry would become extinct if something were to happen to sever the connection between external expressions and the internal nature of men and women.
• The size, shape and structure of a man's body tell more important facts about his real self--what he thinks and what he does--than the average mother ever knows about her own child.
• Five Biological Types - Human Analysis differs from every other system of character analysis in that it classifies man, for the first time, into five types according to his biological evolution. It deals with man in the light of the most recent scientific discoveries. It estimates each individual according to his "human" qualities rather than his "character" or so-called "moral" qualities. In other words, it takes his measure as a human being and determines from his externals his chances for success in the world of today.
• ...bring to mind any intimate friends, or even that husband or wife, and note how few changes they have made in their way of doing things in twenty years!
• Every human being is born with preferences and predilections which manifest themselves from earliest childhood to death. These inborn tendencies are never obliterated and seldom controlled to any great extent, and then only by individuals who have learned the power of the mind over the body. Inasmuch as this knowledge is possessed by only a few, most of the people of the earth are blindly following the dictates of their inborn leanings.
• Succeed at What We Like - No person achieves success or happiness when compelled to do what he naturally dislikes to do. Since these likes and dislikes stay with him to the grave, one of the biggest modern problems is that of helping men and women to discover and to capitalize their inborn traits.
• Furthermore just as a Ford never changes into a Pierce nor a Pierce into a Ford, a human being never changes his type. He may modify it, train it, polish it or control it somewhat, but he will never change it.
• The world classifies human beings according to their superficialities. To the world a human motorcycle can pass for a Rolls-Royce any day if sufficiently camouflaged with diamonds, curls, French heels and plucked eyebrows.
• In the same manner many a bicycle in human form gets elected to Congress because he plays his machinery for all it is worth and gets a hundred per cent service out of it. Every such person learned early in life what kind of car he was and capitalized its natural tendencies.
• The most man can do for his neighbor is to understand and inspire him. The most he can do for himself is to understand and organize his inborn capacities.
• the nutritive, circulatory, muscular, bony or nervous
• 
• When he takes the trouble to think about it there are a few kinds of people the Alimentive does not care for. The man who is bent on discussing the problems of the universe, the highbrow who wants to practise his new relativity lecture on him, the theorist who is given to lengthy expatiations, and all advocates of new isms and ologies are avoided by the pure Alimentive. He calls them faddists, fanatics and fools.
• But Nature must have intended fat people to manage the rest of us instead of taking a hand at the "heavy work." She made them averse to toil and then made them so likable that they can usually get the rest of us to do their hardest work for them.
• They fail to recognize that the world always pays the big salaries not for hand work but for head work, and not so much for working yourself as for your ability to get others to work.
• ...and he knows that quarrels are expensive, not alone in the chances they lose him, but in nerve force and peace of mind.
• This personal element will be found to dominate the activities, conversation and interests of the Alimentive. For him to like a thing or buy a thing it must come pretty near being something he can eat, wear, live in or otherwise personally enjoy. He confines himself to the concrete and tangible. But most of all he confines himself to things out of which he gets something for himself.
• ... the fat man is built around his stomach--and stomachs do not read!
• Gaining his ends by flattery, cajolery, and various more or less innocent little deceptions are the only social handicaps of this type.
• One average-minded fat man near the door of a business establishment will make more customers in a month by his geniality, joviality and sociableness than a dozen brilliant thinkers will in a year. Every business that deals directly with the public should have at least one fat person in it.
• 
• You can always tell what any individual WANTS MOST by what he DOES. The man who thinks he wants a thing or wishes he wanted it talks about getting it, envies those who have it and plans to start doing something about it. But the man who really WANTS a thing GOES AFTER it, sacrifices his leisure, his pleasures and sometimes love itself--and GETS it.
• To be able to put one's self in the role of another, to feel as he feels; to be so keenly sensitive to his situation and psychology that one almost becomes that person for the time being, is the heart and soul of acting.
• We are prone to judge every one by ourselves.
• The man who makes but one mistake a year because he makes but two decisions is wrong fifty per cent of the time.
• An aim, a definite goal is essential to the progress of any individual. It should be made with care and in keeping with one's personality, talents, training, education, environment and experience, and having been made should be adhered to with the determination which does not permit little things to interfere with it.
• The big problem of individual success is the problem of eliminating non-essentials--of "hewing to the line, letting the chips fall where they may." Most of the things that steal your time, strength, money and energy are nothing but chips. If you pay too much attention to them you will never hew out anything worth while.
• We do not like anything we do not understand and we seldom understand anything that differs decidedly from ourselves.
• He wants his house to be elegant, the grounds "different," the view unusual.
• 
• Morality is mostly a matter of how much temptation you can withstand.
• The most that training can do is to brace up the weak spots in us; to cultivate the strong ones; to teach us to avoid inimical environments; and to constantly remind us of the penalties we pay whenever we digress.
• Work palls on the Alimentive and monotony on the Thoracic, but leisure is what palls on the Muscular.
• We tell others to do certain things because "it will do you good" but the real reason usually is that we like to do it ourselves.
• All emotions powerfully affect muscles. A sad thought flits through your mind and instantly the muscles of your face droop and the corners of your mouth go down. Hundreds of similar illustrations with which you are already familiar serve to prove how close is the connection between emotions and muscles. The heart itself is nothing more nor less than a large, tough, leather-like muscle.
• 
• Externals are not accidental; they always correspond to the internal nature in every form of life.
• If you desire to know at once what kind of person the Osseous is, put the Alimentive and Thoracic types together and mix them thoroughly. The Osseous is the opposite of that mixture.
• Everything in one of Nature's creatures matches the other parts. Agassiz, the great naturalist, when given the scale of a fish could reconstruct for you the complete organism of the type of fish from which it came. Give a tree-leaf to a botanist and he will reconstruct the size, shape, structure and color of the tree back of it. He will describe to you its native environment and its functions; what its bark, blossoms and branches look like and what to do to make it grow.
• The typical New England housewife, who washes on Mondays, irons on Tuesdays and bakes on Saturdays for forty years, is a direct descendant of the Puritans, most of whom belong to this bony, pioneering type.
• The Alimentive avoids those he does not like and forgets them because it is too much bother to hate; the Thoracic flames up one moment and forgives the next; the Muscular takes it out in a fight then and there, or argues with you about it. But the Osseous despises, hates and loathes--and keeps on for years after every one else has forgotten all about it.
• The pure Alimentive seldom troubles his head about causes. The Thoracic is the type that lives chiefly for the pleasure of the moment and the adventures of life. The Muscular fights hard and works hard for various movements. But it is the Osseous who dies for his beliefs.
• There is little to be done with the Osseous when you meet him socially except to let him do what he wants to do. Don't interfere with him if you want him to like you.
• 
• Mind and matter are so inseparably bound up together in man's organism that it is impossible to say just where mind ends and matter begins.
• We are so constructed that brain and stomach--each of which demands an extra supply of blood when performing its work--can not function with maximum efficiency simultaneously.
• The Alimentive lives to eat, the Thoracic to feel, the Muscular to act, the Osseous to stabilize, but the Cerebral lives to meditate.
• But the man who can only dream lives in a very hostile world. His real world is his thoughts but whenever he steps out of them into human society he feels a stranger and he is one.
• Ideas always have to go begging at first, and the greater the idea the rougher the sledding.
• The ideal combination is a dreamer who can DO or a doer who knows the power of a DREAM. Thinking and acting--almost every individual is doing too much of one and too little of the other!
• He is too abstract to add to the gaiety of social gatherings, for these are based on the enjoyment of the concrete.
• Another reason why he has few friends is because these people, being in the great minority, are not easy to find.
• Since we get only what we go after in this world, it follows that the Cerebral is often poor. To make money one must want money. Competition for it is so keen that only those who want it badly and work with efficiency ever get very much of it.
• As we have seen, all the other types have decided preferences as to their clothes--the Alimentive demands comfort, the Thoracic style, the Muscular durability and the Osseous sameness--but the extreme Cerebral type says "anything will do."
• We have always said people were "absent-minded" when their minds were absent from what they were doing. This often applies to the Cerebral for he is capable of greater concentration than other types; also he is so frequently compelled to do things in which he has no interest that his mind naturally wanders to the things he cares about.
• The poor talker sometimes surprises us by being a good writer. Such a one is usually of the Cerebral type.
• ...and when society idlers will not be considered better than people who earn their livings.
• The world is managed by fat men, entertained by florid men, built by muscular men, opposed by bony men, but is improved in the final analysis by its thinking men.
• Fame is the food of the tomb.
• In the room of the Alimentive you will find cushions, sofas and "eats;" in that of the Thoracic you will find colorful, unusual things; the Muscular will have durable, solid, plain things; the Osseous will have fewer of everything but what he does have will be in order. But the pure Cerebral's furnishings--if he is responsible for them--will be an indifferent array, with no two pieces matching. Furthermore, everything will be piled with newspapers, magazines, books and clippings.
• The type PREDOMINATING in a person determines WHAT he does throughout his life--the NATURE of his main activities. The type which comes second in development will determine the WAY he does things--the METHODS he will follow in doing what his predominant type signifies.
• Human happiness is attained only through doing what the organism was built to do, in an environment that is favorable.
• Every individual owes it to himself to find the right work and the right mate, because these are fundamental needs of every human being. Lacking them, life is a failure; possessing but one of them, life is half a failure.
• Accordingly, just as it is easier to change the frosting on a cake than to change the inside, it is easier to change a man's religion than to change his activities.
• In other words, more than seventy per cent of American divorces are granted because husbands and wives can not adapt themselves to each other in the matter of how they shall spend their LEISURE hours.
• The only time we are free to act is during our leisure hours. All other hours are mortgaged to earning a living--in the accomplishment of which we often have very little outlet for natural trends. So it is only "after hours" and "over Sundays" that the masses of mankind have an opportunity to express their real natures.
• Law of Marital Happiness - Marriage should take place only between those whose first type-elements are sufficiently similar for them to enjoy the same general diversions, yet whose second type-elements are sufficiently dissimilar to make each strong where the other is weak.
• The human ego is so constituted that we tend to like all interesting people who do not offer us opposition.
• The business man has enough of "brilliant" people all day. When he gets home he is rather inclined to be merely the "tired business man," and in that state nothing is more agreeable than a wife with a smile.
• Feminine prettiness (not beauty) consists of the rose-bud mouth, the baby eyes, the cute little nose, the round cheeks, the dimpled chin, etc.--all more or less monopolized by the Alimentive type.
• Sales people everywhere say, "We like to see a fat woman coming, for she usually has money, spends it freely and is easy to please."
• For this type of woman, unlike the home-keeping Alimentive, enjoys being a widow and remains one. She usually has many chances to remarry but her changeable, gaiety-loving nature revels in the freedom, sophistication and distinction of widowhood. The appearance of endless youth given by her alive, responsive personality deceives the most discerning as to her age. The woman of f ifty who enthralls the youths of twenty-five is usually of the Thoracic type.
• The same thing happens every day between severe, bony wives and their florid, frolicking husbands. "She is a perfect housekeeper and a good wife" exclaim her friends--"why should her husband spend his evenings away from home?" These questions will continue to be asked until we realize that being "a good housekeeper and a good wife" does not fill the bill with a Thoracic man. A wife who will leave the dinner dishes in the kitchen sink occasionally and run away with him for a "lark" on a moment's notice is the kind that retains the love of her f lorid husband. A husband who is willing to leave his favorite magazine, pipe, and slippers to take her out in the evening is the kind a Thoracic woman likes. She even prefers a "gay devil" to a "stick"--as she calls the slow ones.
• So, even when they love him best they usually marry the fat salesman, the Muscular worker who always has a good job, the Thoracic promoter who promises luxury, or the Osseous man who won't take "No" for an answer.
• "When poverty comes in the door love flies out the window" is a saying as old as it is sad. And it is as true as it is both old and sad.
• Poverty does more to bring out the worst in people and conceal the best than anything else in the world.
• Because he lives in his mind and not in his external world the predominantly Cerebral must marry one who also is predominantly Cerebral. The reading of books, attendance at good plays, and the study of great movements constitute the chief enjoyments of this type and if he has a mate who cares nothing for these things his marriage is bound to be a failure.
• But here's the rub. You will never do anything with that brilliant efficiency save what you LIKE TO DO. Efficiency does not come from duty, or necessity, or goading, or lashing, or anything under heaven save ENJOYMENT OF THE THING ITSELF. Nothing less will ever release those hidden powers, those miraculous forces which, for the lack of a better name, we call "genius."
• Whenever you are considering your fitness for any vocation, ask yourself these questions:
• Self-Question 1 - Am I considering this vocation chiefly because I would enjoy the things it would bring--such as salary, fame, social position or change of scene? If, in your heart, your answer is "Yes," this is not a vocation for you.
• Self-Question 2 - Knowing the requirements of this vocation--its tasks, drudgeries, hours of work, concentration and kind of activity--would I choose to follow them in preference to any other kind of activity even if the income were the same? Would I do these things for the pleasure of doing them and not for the pay? If, in your heart, you can answer "Yes" to these questions, your problem is settled; you will succeed in that vocation. For you will so enjoy your work that it will be play. Being play, you will do it so happily that you will get from it new strength each day.
• Self-Question 3 - Do I tend to follow, of my own accord, for the sheer joy of it, the kinds of activity demanded by this vocation which I am contemplating? If you do not you will never succeed in this line of work.
• To be a success you must PRODUCE something out of the ordinary for the world.
• But they found a line that fitted their particular talents, and they went ahead cultivating those talents without asking for everything in advance.
• Life is full of opportunities for every person who will consult his own capacities and aim for the big chance.
• Parents can be divided into three classes--those who over-estimate their children, those who under-estimate their children, and those who do not estimate them at all.
• I don't want any of my boys to be lawyers. Lawyers are all liars. Ministers are worse; they're all a bunch of Sissies. Doctors are all fakes. Actors are all bad eggs; and business is one big game of cheat or be cheated. I'm going to see that every boy I've got becomes a farmer.
• He must avoid working for, with, under or over others. The Osseous should never have a partner if he can help it.

Here are my notes from book "Summerhill School" from A. S. Neill:

• p3 Teachers want to be little gods protected by dignity. They fear that if they act human, their authority will vanish and their classrooms will become bedlams. They fear to abolish fear. Innumerable children are afraid of their teachers. It is discipline that creates the fear.
• p6 It is because I believe that a difficult child is nearly always made difficult by wrong treatment at home as well as at school that I dare to address parents as well as teachers.
• p7 The difficult child is the child who is unhappy. He is at war with himself; and in consequence, he is at war with the world. The difficult adult is in the same boat. No happy man ever disturbed a meeting, or preached a war, or lynched a Negro. No happy woman ever nagged her husband or her children. No happy man ever committed a murder or a theft. No happy employer ever frightened his employees. All crimes, all hatred, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness. This book is an attempt to show how unhappiness arise, how it ruins human lives, and how children can be reared so that much of this unhappiness will never arise. More than that, this book is the story of a place - Summerhill School - where children's unhappiness is cured and, more important, where children are reared in happiness.
• p8 Newspapers have called it a 'go-as-you-please school' and have implied that it is a gathering of wild primitives who know no law and have no manners.
• p15 You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo - a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train - a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man - the scared-to-death conformist.
• p19 Under adult discipline, the child can become a hater. Since the child cannot express his hatred of adults with impunity, he takes it out on smaller or weaker boys.
• p22 It is well known that 'the law makes the crime'.
• p25 One spring we had a spate of bad luck. Some community-minded seniors had left us after passing their O level exams, so that there were very few seniors left in the school. The vast majority of the pupils were at the gangster stage and age. Although they were social in their speeches, they were not old enough to run the community well. They passed any amount of laws and then forgot them and broke them. The few older pupils left were, by some chance, rather individualist, and tended to live their own lives in their own groups, so that the staff was figuring too prominently in attacking the breaking of the schools rules. Thus it came about that at a General Meeting I felt compelled to launch a vigorous attack on the seniors for being not antisocial but asocial, breaking te bedtime rules by sitting up far too late and taking no interest in what the juniors were doing in an antisocial way.
• p26 There has to be a certain amount of sacrifice on the part of the adult if children are to live according to their inner nature.
• p29 The upshot was that my proposal to leave doors unlocked was supported by two hands - my own and that of girl or seven. And I discovered later that she thought we were still voting on the previous motion, that children of seven be allowed to go to the cinema. The children were learning out of their own experience that private property should be respected.
• p30 The outside world wastes its precious energy in worrying over trifles. As if it matters in the scheme of life whether you wear dressy clothes or say hell.
• p30 True, it is apt to call a spade a damn shovel, but any ditch digger will tell you with truth that a spade is a damn shovel.
• p32 Why children and kittens play I do not know I believe it is a matter of energy.
• p32 At Summerhill the six-year-olds play the whole day long - play with fantasy. To s small child, reality and fantasy are very close to each other. ... Small children live a life of fantasy and they carry this fantasy over into action. Boys of eight to fourteen play gangsters or Red Indians and are always bumping people off or flying the skies in their wooden aeroplanes. Small girls also go through a gang stage, but it does not take the form of guns and swords. It is more personal. Mary's gang objects to Nellie's gang, and there are rows and hard words. Boys' rival gangs only play enemies. Small boys are thus more easy to live wit than small girls.
• p33 It seems to be clear that boys and girls have different ideas about play. Boys play much more than girls do. Sometimes a girls appears to substitute a fantasy life for play, but boys do that. Boys do not generally play with girls. Boys play gangsters, and play tag games; they build tree huts; they dig holes and trenches and do all the things that small children usually do. Girls seldom organize any play. The time-honoured game of playing teacher or doctor is unknown among free children, for they feel no need to mimic authority. Smaller girls play with dolls; but older girls seem to get the most fun out of contact with people, not things.
• p36 Self-regulation implies a belief in human nature, a belief that there is not, and never was, original sin. Self-regulation means the right of a baby to live freely without outside authority. It means the baby feeds when it is hungry; that it becomes clean in habits only when it wants to; that it is never stormed at nor spanked; that it shall always be loved and protected. Of course, self-regulation, like any theoretical idea, is dangerous if not combined with common sense.
• p44 Freedom means doing what you like, so long as you don't interfere with the freedom of others. The result is self-discipline.
• p45 The fight is an unequal one, for the haters control education, religion, the law, the armies, and the vile prisons. Only a handful of educators strive to allow the good in all children to grow in freedom. The vast majority of children are being moulded by anti-life supporters with their hateful system of punishments.
• p45 The tragedy of man is that, like the dog, his character can be moulded. You cannot mould the character of a cat. You can give a dog a bad conscience, but you cannot give a conscience to a cat. Yet most people prefer dogs because their obedience and their flattering tail-wagging afford visible proof of the master's superiority and worth.
• p46 Freedom is necessary for the child because only under freedom can he grow in his natural way - the good way. I see the results of constraint in new pupils coming from other schools. They are bundles of insincerity, with an unreal politeness and phoney manners. Their reaction to freedom is rapid and tiresome. For the first week or two, they open doors for the teachers, call me 'sir', and wash carefully. They glance at me with 'respect', which is easily recognized as fear. After a few weeks of freedom, they show what they really are. They become impudent, unmannerly, unwashed. They do all the things they have been forbidden to do in the past: they swear, they smoke, they break things. And all the time, they have polite and insincere expression in their eyes and in their voices.
• p47 Criminality appears in a child as a perverted form of love.
• p47 If I can't get love, I can get hate. Every case of criminality in a child can be traced to lack of love.
• p47 We cannot get away from the fact that a child is primarily an egoist. No one else matters. When the ego is satisfied, we have what we call goodness; when the ego is starved, we have what we call criminality. The criminal revenges himself on society because society has failed to appreciate his ego by showing love for him. The young gangsters of the world are seeking happiness, and I make the guess that their unhappiness in home and school is the root cause of their being antisocial. The happiness they should have had in childhood gave place to the spurious happiness of damaging and stealing and beating people up.
• p48 A boy is born is a mean street. His home has no culture, no books, no serious conversation. His parents are ignorant and slap him and yell at him; he attends a school where strict discipline and dull subjects cramp his style. His playground is the street corner. His ideas about sex are pornographic and dirty. On television he sees people with money and cars and all sorts of luxuries. At adolescence he gets into gang whose aim is to get rich quick at all costs. How can we cure a boy with that background?
• p49 Lane was a genius in the understanding and handling of delinquent children. He cured them because he constantly gave out love and understanding. He always looked for the hidden motive in any delinquent act, convinced that behind every crime was a wish that originally had been a good one. He found that talking to children was useless, and that only action counted. He held that in order to rid a child of a bad social trait on should let the child live out his desires.
• p53 For years Ansi had found pleasure in leading her school gang against authority. In stirring up rebellion, she was doing something she hated. She hated chaos. Underneath, she was a law-abiding citizen. But Ansi had a great desire for power. She was happy only when she was directing others. In rebelling against her teacher, she was trying to make herself more important than the teacher. She hated laws because she hated the power that made laws. I find such power cases much more difficult to cure than sex cases. One can with comparative ease track down the incidents and teachings that give a child a bad conscience about sex, but to track down the thousands of incidents and teachings that have made a child a sadistic power person is difficult indeed.
• p55 Love is being on the side of the other person. Love is approval. I know that children learn slowly that freedom is something totally different from licence. But they can learn this truth and do learn it. In the end, it works - nearly every time.
• p57 The best way to make a child a liar for life is to insist that he speak the truth and nothing but the truth.
• p60 There is no short cut to curing under freedom; it is a long weary time until the problem child turns his or her corner. I am convinced that our characters are formed very early in life, and although they can be modified be environment or therapy, in them remain elements that are beyond change. I can find traces of Calvinism in myself, irrational fears that stem from the first years of my life.
• p62 Freedom works best with those who have enough combined free emotion and free intelligence to absorb it.
• p66 You can do nothing if a vital truth has to be kept dark.
• p68 If he is going to use psychology he should do so more in action than in words. Hugging a child will often do much more for it than interpreting its dreams.
• p70 My motto is: take from each [system] what you want and reject the rest, and never label yourself as one of a school. I'd hate to think that long after I am dead teachers will call themselves Summerhilliens. They will thus advertise the fact that they are dead.
• p72 Today the word therapy makes me think of Hermann Goering's: 'When I hear the word Kultur I reach for my gun.' In my time I have met dozens of people treated by all schools of psychology, and their therapy had not apparently changed them into active, creative, happy people.
• p73 I think it is happiness that makes our girls look attractive and our boys handsome.
• p78 The tidies person often has the most untidy mind. I say this with all the detachment of a man whose desk always looks like a heap of papers under a 'No Litter' notice in a public park.
• p82 The good health that we enjoy at Summerhill is due to freedom, good food, and fresh air - in that order.
• p85 The perverts who require to be scourged with whips or to beat women with rods are merely extreme cases of people who, owing to sex miseducation, are unable to give love except in the disguised form of hate.
• p87 'Why not? This is a free school.' 'Yes, but it isn't a free civilization. Suppose I gave you one and the Ministry of Education heard of it. They would close my school.'
• p88 Conditioned children of both sexes are often incapable of loving. This news may be comforting to those who fear sex; but to youth in general, the inability to love is a great human tragedy.
• p89 Sex with love is the greatest pleasure in the world, and it is repressed because it is the greatest pleasure.
• p95 In fact, death enters early into every child's fantasies.
• p101 I might define myself as a true believer in humanity. My message has been this one; a child's emotions are infinitely more important than his intellectual progress. I have tried, with I fear little success, to show that schools, by ignoring emotions, leave them to outside influences, the press, the kitsch of radio and TV, commercial TV ads, a plethora of magazines geared to a mentality of ten.
• p102 Freedom works best with clever children. I should like to be able to say that since freedom plays most of the time for years; but when the time comes, the bright ones will sit down and tackle the work necessary to master the subjects covered by government exams. In little over two years, a boy or girl will cover the work that disciplined children take eight years to cover.
• In our educational policy a nation, we refuse to let live. We persuade through fear. But there is a great difference between compelling a child to cease throwing stones and compelling him to learn Latin. Throwing stones involves others; but learning Latin involves only boy. The community has the right to restrain the antisocial boy because he is interfering with the rights of others; but the community has no right to compel a boy to learn Latin - for learning Latin is a matter for the individual. Forcing a child to learn is on a par with forcing a man to adopt a religion by act of Parliament. And it is equally foolish.
• p104 ... the words of the old public-school headmaster: "It doesn't matter what you teach a boy so long as he dislikes it."
• p107 When I lecture to students at teacher training colleges and universities, I am often shocked at the ungrownupness of these lads and lasses stuffed with useless knowledge. They know a lot; they shine in dialectics; they can quote the classics - but in their outlook on life many of them are infants. For they have been taught to know, but have not been allowed to feel. These students are friendly, pleasant, eager, but something is lacking - the emotional factor, the power to subordinate thinking to feeling. I talk to them of a world thay have missed and go on missing. Their textbooks do not deal with human character, or with love, or with freedom, or with self-determination. And so the system goes on, aiming only at standards of book learning - goes on separating the head from the heart.
• p108 Higher education and university degree do not make a scrap of difference in confronting the evils of society. A learned neurotic is no better than an unlearned neurotic.
• p110 To every child, adult approval means love; wheres disapproval means hate.
• p112 When I lived in Germany the only Germans who seemed able to laugh at themselves were the Jews.
• p113 Humour is a kind of emotional safety-valve and it a man cannot laugh at himself he is dead before his death. Someone once wrote that most men die when they are forty but aren't buried until they are seventy. He must have meant the humourless men.
• p114 Once a young man thought he could run the school better than I could. He agitated among the staff and made some converts so that the atmosphere was one you could cut with knife. I should give up being the boss; the staff should handle everything, finance, entolment of pupils, salaries. Naturally I got rid of the rebels as soon as I could, reluctantly, for they were good teachers. I fancy that, instead of challenging father substitute, even a non-authoritarian one. I doubt if Summerhill could be run by a committee, for the progress of a committee is too often the pace of the more conservative members.
• p115 It is sad that old pupils do not become teachers and return as members of the staff. Perhaps they are too well-balanced to teach, but I have had housemothers whe were ex-pupils and they did this work well - partly because they did not require a period of living out their complexes when coming to a non-authoritarian atmosphere.
• p117 A recent woman visitor said to me, "Why don't you teach your pupils about life of Jesus, so that hey will be inspired to follow in his steps?" I answered that one learns to live, not by hearing of other lives, but by living; for words are infinitely less important than acts. Many have called Summerhill a religious place because it gives out love to children.
• p117 In my boyhood, faith was easy to accept. The earth was the centre of the universe and a kindly God had put the sun and moon and starts there to light our footsteps. He was a very personal God; he knew us all individually and when we died rewarded us with a harp or punished us with a fire. We had no idea that our earth was a minnow in an ocean of stars and planets. Because our earth was the center of the universe, man was the supreme subject of creation, and like the stars immortal.
• p118 And because Granny and Boston had no doubts, but I knew, as if by instinct, that hell was my destination. Yet there was no hate in Granny. She was a vary human, loving woman, and one of her joys was to listen to the often obscene gossip of the woman from the cottage over the road.
• p118 The Bible says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." It is much more often the beginning of psychic disorder. For to invest a child with fear in any form is harmful.
• p119 To ask a little child to be unselfish is wrong. Every child is an egoist. The world belongs to him. His power of wishing is strong; he has only to wish and he is king of the earth. When he is given an apple his one wish is to eat that apple. And the chief result of mother's encouraging him to share his very own apple with his little brother is to make him hate the little brother. Altruism comes later, comes naturally if the child is not taught to be unselfish; probably never comes at all when the child is taught to be unselfish. The young altruist is merely the child who likes to please others while he is satisfying his own selfishness. By suppressing the child's selfishness the selfishness becomes fixed. An unfulfilled wish lives on in the unconscious. The child who is taught to be unselfish will remain stuck being selfish through life. Moral instruction thus defeats its own purpose.
• p120 Children unconsciously realize that stealing is sickness. They are little realists, and are far too sensible to postulate an angry God and a tempting devil.
• p121 I personally have nothing against the man who believes in god - no matter what god. What I object to is the man who claims that his god is the authority for his imposing restrictions on human growth and happiness. The battle is not between believers in theology and non-believers in theology; it is between believers in human freedom and believers in the suppression of human freedom.
• p122 To be a free soul, happy in work, happy in friendship, and happy in live, or to be a miserable bundle of conflicts, hating one's self and hating humanity - one or the other is the legacy that parents and teachers give to every child.
• p125 Of course, the philistine can say, "Humph, so you call a lorry driver a success in life!" My own criterion of success is the ability to work joyfully and to live positively. Under that definition, most pupils in Summerhill turn to be successes in life.
• p133 Success to me does not mean degree and good jobs and fame; success means seeing a child come with a face full of hate and fear and in two years have a face full of life and happiness.
• p135 The inspectors are blind to the fact that Summerhill runs on the principle that if the emotions are free our intellect will look after itself. One cannot teach anything of importance - to love, to have charity - and one cannot inspect anything of importance.
• p137 I like to meet the man who, at the age of fifty-three, says he doesn't quite know what he is to be in life.
• p144 An Indian lady asked me a string of questions. She flicked back her pages. "But, Mr Neill, ten minutes ago you gave the very opposite reply." "I grow quickly," I said. "You can't expect me to stand still, can you?" She did not even smile.
• p145 I have usually found that the poorer the parents the more punctual they are in paying the fees.
• p148 The young devil in hell rushed to his master in great perturbation. 'Master, master, something awful has happened; they have discovered truth on earth!' The devil smiled. 'That's all right, boy. I'll send someone up to organize it.'
• p149 It takes no genius; one does not have to be a superman, only a man or woman without the wish to tell others how to live.
• p150 Disciples are dangerous and too often inferior.
• p164 For many, money comes too late in life to have any deep significance.
• p166 "The boy's just hopeless," said my father gloomily. "He might be a teacher," ventured my mother. "It's about all he's fit for," said my father grimly, and without a smile.
• p171 The lesson is this, Neill. Good music you can hear again and again: inferior music bores you stiff if you get it more than once. --H. M. Willsher
• p175 It was all piddling stuff, like taking Milan Cathedral to pieces stone by stone to discover where the beauty lay.
• p177 Nowadays I should tell them the truth, that I was poor. Mainly from my mother, who feared that we might revert to her working-class mother's status, I had the idea that poverty was a crime, a thing to be ashamed of, to hide as skilfully as one could. I must have played my part well, for years afterwards a fellow student, who had been a pal, remarked, "Yes, it was all very well for you, Neill. You had money and I hadn't."
• p177 The whole question of my attitude towards money is important. Because of the poverty suffered in my young years, I have a queer meanness about money. I grudge paying out small sums, yet can sign a cheque for a large amount without a moment's hesitation. Many other men regard cheques in a similar way: to us, a cheque isn't real money. It is fantasy money, and therefore of no emotional value.
• p184 Just as a person's fear changes into positive energy when rowing a boat in a bad swell, so he can absorb terror and pity while assisting others in pain. And one cannot feel deeply for complete strangers.
• p202 I disclaim any originality in thought. Indeed, if I have any merit it is that I have a flair for spotting the people who matter.
• p202 ... and, or course Christ. I admit that last influence with difficulty, owing to my early "religious" training which made hi a god instead of a most human human. All I have gained from the general picture is a vision of the man Jesus, a man giving love, asking none in exchange. He also had charity, condemning no one if we except the money-changers, and there his reaction only showed how human he was. Sin to him appeared to be sickness; he apparently was conscious of man's unconscious two thousand years before Freud was born. He did no have to resist temptation because within himself he did not feel guilty.
• p203 Some men use humour to cover up more serious matters in life, for it is easy to laugh something off instead of facing it.
• p209 It meant putting learning in its place - below living. As a schoolmaster i had used knowledge as the criterion of success. Lane showed me that emotions were infinitely more powerful and more vital than intellect.
• p214 The first and last Christian died on the Cross. --Nietzsche
• p214 Lane did not need a religion; he lived religion, that is, if "religion" means giving out love and not hate.
• p215 One evil of humanity is that we persist in telling children how to live. All our educational systems strive to mould them in the image of their elders, and the children in turn mould their children, and one result is a very sick world full of crime and hate and wars. Thus, the vicious circle persists, and millions of children are unhappy and tense in mind and body. The weight of this tradition is so heavy that only one man in a thousand can ever challenge or even want to challenge the morals and taboos of society.
• p219 "Bend the tree when when it is a twig and it will be bend when it is fully grown." He also said, "What is wrong with psychoanalysis is that is deals with words, while all the damage is done to a child before it can speak."
• p220 This is what I cannot get at, the "why" of mankind's hate and war and discipline.
• p221 It is obvious from his wife Ilse's book that Reich in the end lost his reason. That never worried me; many great men went mad - Swift, Nietzsche, Schumann, Ruskin, lots of others. (I know I am not a genius because I haven't.) To me it didn't matter a damn if he has a streak of paranoia ... who doesn't?
• p224 I used to think that the way to a girl's heart was paved with compliments, and it took me a long time to discover that another man won her heart by telling her what a nasty bitch she was.
• p231 Summerhill has been a scientific experiment in one respect, in that we strove to impose nothing, we simply stood by and observed what children were and did when left to themselves.
• p241 Altogether, I think I am rather proud of these facts, feeling that to be acknowledged by the officials would suggest that I was out of date.
• p243 Nowadays, I do not think in terms of youth and age. I feel that years have little to do with one's thinking. I know lads of twenty who are ninety, and men of sixty who are twenty. I am thinking in terms of freshness, enthusiasm, of lack of conservatism, of deadness, of pessimism.
• p243 Age lessens fear. But age also lessens courage. Years ago, I could easily tell a boy who threatened to jump from a high window if he did not get his own way to go on and jump. I am not so sure I could do so today.
• p244 I have lived to see - won't say the death of God since there are many millions of Moslems and Catholics around - lived to see the decline of Protestant religion. In England the churches are not full; youth is largely indifferent to organized religion. It does not believe in si and heaven and hell.Its gods are more harmless - pop stars, disc jockeys, football heroes - but the "new religion" has one characteristic in common with the old: the hate and violence between the supporters of football teams compares with the hate and violence in religious Ulster with its Roman Catholic and Protestant teams wanting to murder each other.
• p246 Children have changed in some indefinable ways. ... Fundamentally the change in youth must be due to its loss of faith in age, in authority, in power, and for that I can cry hurrah to the new generation.
• p249 Freedom is a relative term. The freedom we think about in Summerhill is individual freedom, inner freedom. Few of us can have that inner freedom. In our school freedom means doing what you like so long as you do not interfere with the freedom of others. That is the outer meaning, but deeper down we strive to see that children are free internally, free from fear, from hypocrisy, from hate, from intolerance.
• p250 New generations must be given the chance to grow in freedom. The bestowal of freedom is the bestowal of love. And only love can save the world.
• p253 Perhaps the most puzzling feature in man is his capacity for sacrificing himself for objects he is unconscious of.
• p257 Their attitude was: "This is a free school: I'll do what I like." It took them some time to grasp the fact that freedom does not mean doing exactly as you like. They found that in a self-governing school they had to obey the law made by the whole community. And it was hard for some of them to conform.
• p259 Our schools' chief function is to kill the life of children. Otherwise the Establishment would be powerless. Would millions of free men allow themselves to be sacrificed to causes they had no interest in and did not understand? Is the future of humanity one of slaves ruled by an élite of powerful masters?
• p262 Unfortunately most things in life come too late. Barrie put it: "They give you nuts to chew when your teeth have gone."
• p262 I am often spoken of as the man who loves children. Love is hardly the world to use a problem boy is breaking my school windows. One cannot love masses, only individuals, and not all individuals are lovable. No, I reject the word love; I prefer Homer Lane's "being on the side of the child", which means approval, sympathy, kindness, plus a complete absence of adult authority. It is of more value to understand children than to love them.
• p263 Is the radical marching with red flag because he loves the poor, or because he hates the rich? Alas, to look for motives is as useless as to look for a life plan.
• p265 No, self-analysis is impossible. You cannot psychoanalyse yourself because you cannot face the factors that would offend your own opinion of your ego.
• p266 I am ignorant about psychology. Where does the truth lie? In Freud, Jung, Reich, Marcuse, Fromm, Rogers? Is sex repression the main cause of world wickedness? If Adler's power motive is right why fo the masses have no power and no desire to obtain it? If original sin exists why aren't all crooks and murderers?
• p267 It is a fallacy that knowledge means power. I have known men who seemed to know everything, and understood nothing.
• p267 Nay, the important thing is not ultimately to know, it is to feel, and all the university degrees in the world do not help one to feel.

Here are my notes from a book strange book called "Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard". I found it hard to read and hard to understand. One reason could also be that the translation was not very good.

• p3 To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other and absence.
• p6 it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum
• p7 In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being "discovered" and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.
• p12 Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, ...
• p13 Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. On a mental level, Disneyland is the prototype of this new function. But all the sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.
• p18 It would take too long to traverse the entire range of the operational negativity of all those scenarios of deterrence, which, like Watergate, try to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder - a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis. It is always a question of providing the real through the imaginary, providing truth through scandal, proving law through transgression, providing work through striking, proving system through crisis, and capital through revolution, ... Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes.
• p24 Death is never an absolute criterion, but in this case it is significant: the era of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply because they had a mythic dimension that implies death ( not for romantic reasons, but because of the fundamental principle of reversal and exchange) - this era is long gone. It is not the era of murder by simulation, ... Power floats like money, like language, like theory. Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. It they became weak for one reason or another, power has no other recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them. ... One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and destroy it, because this system that is dying from being dispossessed of its death expects nothing but that from us: that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the negativity.
• p33 The balance of terror is the terror of balance.
• p79 The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
• p79 We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
• p84 Is it the media that induce fascination on the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.
• p85 Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
• p87 Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possibility of metamorphosis, has power over all the others. All current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein.
• p134 Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them worse: that we have made them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of out justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from butchery.
• p149 The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance of an end purpose of knowledge.
• p152 Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight - without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination. Because one must not refuse the intense fascination that emanates from this liquidation of all power, of all axes of value, of all axiology, politics included.
• p155 In this sense the university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value, and those who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work, the true desperation of nonwork, of nonknowledge. Because current generations still dream of reading, of learning, of competing, but their heart isn't in it - as a whole, the ascetic cultural mentality has run body and possessions together.
• This is why the strike no longer means anything. It is also why we were trapped, we trapped ourselves, after 1968, into giving diplomas to everybody.
• p162 Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.
• p163 The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.
• p164 There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal.

My notes from book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.

• p9 The number of things I am right about would fill a book.
• p10 These are not questions of right and wrong, but questions of interpretation and judgement. Interpretations and judgements are important to explore. In contrast, the quest to determine who is right and who is wrong is a dead end.
• p12 From the front seat looking back, it is easy to see how each child has contributed to the fight. It's much more difficult to see how we've contributed to the problems in which we ourselves are involved. But in situations that give ride to difficult conversations, it is almost always true that what happened is the result of things both people did - or failed to do.
• p13 And once we've gotten our feelings off our chest, it's their turn. Are we to hearing all about their anger and pain?
• p14 Understanding feelings, talking about feelings, managing feelings - these are among the greatest challenges of being human. There is nothing that will make dealing with feelings easy and risk-free.
• Asking for a raise? What if you get turned down? In fact, what if your boss gives you good reason for turning you down? What will that do to your self-image as a competent and respected employee? Ostensibly the subject is money, but what's really making you sweat is that your self-image is on the line.
• p25 We disagree with people all the time, and often no one cares very much.
• p28 We don't see ourselves as the problem because, in fact, we aren't. What we are saying does make sense. What's often hard to see is that what other person is saying also makes sense.
• p29 Arguing creates another problem in difficult conversations: it inhibits change. Telling someone to change makes it less rather than more likely that they will. This is because people almost never change without first feeling understood.
• p30 First, we take in information. We experience the world - sights, sounds, and feelings. Second, we interpret what we see, hear, and feel; we give it all meaning. Then we draw conclusions about what's happening. And at each step, there is an opportunity for different people's stories to diverge.
• p31 Each float, it seems, was pulled by a truck. Andrew, truck obsessed as he was, saw nothing else. His Uncle Doug, truck indifferent, hadn't noticed a single truck. In a sense, Andrew and his uncle watched completely different parades.
• p32 Often we go through an entire conversation - or indeed an entire relationship - without ever realizing that each of us is paying attention to different things, that our views are based on different information.
• p34 The past gives meaning to the present. Often, it is only in the context of someone's past experience that we can understand why what they are saying or doing makes any kind of sense.
• p35 We get into trouble when our rules collide.
• p36 We look for information to support our view and give that information the most favorable interpretation. Then we feel even more certain that our view is right.
• p37 "I sometimes failed to persuade the court that I was right, but I never failed to persuade myself!" --Roger Fisher
• p37 There's only one way to come to understand the other person's story, and that's by being curious. ... Certainty locks us out of their story; curiosity lets us in.
• p38 One way to shift your stance from the easy certainty of feeling that you've thought about this from every possible angle is to get curious about what you don't know about yourself.
• p39 Many of us agree with this rule, but it is not a truth, just a rule.
• p49 Each would claim that their own statements were made in self-defense. Those are the two classic characteristics of the cycle: both parties think they are the victim, and both think they are acting only to defend themselves. This is how well-intentioned people get themselves into trouble.
• p50 When we think others have bad intentions toward us, it affects our behavior. And, in turn, how we behave affects how they treat us. Before we know it, our assumption that they have bad intentions toward us has come true.
• p60 "Who is to blame?" => First, did this person cause the problem? Second, if so, how should her actions be judged against some standard of conduct? And third, if the judgment is negative, how should she be punished? => "This was your fault" => it is shorthand for giving condemning answers to all three questions.
• p64 There are situations in which focusing on blame is not only important, but essential. Our legal system is set up to apportion blame, both in the criminal and civil courts. Assigning blame publicly, against clearly articulated legal or moral standards, tell people what is expected of them and allows society to exercise justice.
• p71 One of the most common contributions to a problem, and one of the easiest to overlook, is the simple act of avoiding.
• p74 The problem is that things don't change, because each is waiting for the other to change.
• p85 Feelings are too powerful to remain peacefully bottled. They will be heard one way or another, whether in leaks or bursts. And if handled indirectly or without honesty, they contaminate communication.
• p87 When we lay our feelings on the table, we run the risk of hurting others and of ruining relationships. We also put ourselves in a position to get hurt. What if the other person doesn't take our feelings seriously or responds by telling us something we don't want to hear?
• p89 We don;t cry or lose our temper because we express our feelings too often, but because we express them too rarely. Like finally opening a carbonated drink that has been shaken, the results can be messy.
• p90 It's hard to hear someone else when we are feeling unheard, even if the reason we feel unheard is that we have chosen not to share.
• p91 Before we can get to where we're going, we need to know where we are. When it comes to understanding our own emotions, where most of us are is lost.
• p91 As we grow up, each of us develops a characteristic "emotional footprint" whose shape is determined by which feelings we believe are okay to have and express and which are not.
• p92 Depending on how we handle them, feelings can lead to great trouble. But the feelings themselves just are. In that sense, feelings are like arms or legs. If you hit or kick someone, then your arms or legs are causing trouble. But there's nothing inherently wrong with arms or legs. The same with feelings.
• p93 Don't knock down a wall until you know why it was put up.
• p93 Learn That Your Feelings Are as Important as Theirs. Some of us can't see our own feelings because we have learned somewhere along the way that other people's feelings are more important than ours.
• p94 When you are more concerned about others' feelings than your own, you teach others to ignore your feelings too. And beware: one of the reasons you haven't raised the issue is that you don't want to jeopardize the relationship. Yet by not raising it, the resentment you feel will grow and slowly erode the relationship anyway.
• p97 Peanuts aren't nuts. Whales aren't fish. Tomatoes aren't vegetables. And attribution, judgments, and accusations aren't feelings.
• p100 It isn't the shark that's changed; it's the story you tell yourself about what's happening. In any given situation our feelings follow our thoughts.
• p112 Our anxiety results not just from having to face other person, but from having to face ourselves. The conversation has the potential to disrupt our senses of who we are in the world, or to highlight what we hope we are but fear we are not. The conversation poses a threat to our identity - the story we tell ourselves about ourselves - and having our identity threatened can be profoundly disturbing. Am I Competent? Am I a Good Person? Am I Worthy of Love? Suddenly, who we thought we were when we walked into the conversation is called into question.
• p115 Working to keep negative information out during a difficult conversation is like trying to swim without getting wet.
• p118 Life is too complex for any reasonable person to feel otherwise. Indeed, a self-image that allows for complexity is healthy and robust; it provides a sturdy foundation on which to stand.
• p120 When you hold yourself to an all-or-nothing standard, even a small mistake can seem catastrophic and almost impossible to admit. If you are busy trying to shore up your "no mistakes, no failures" identity, you won't be able to engage in a meaningful learning conversation. And if you can't do that, you are likely to make the same mistakes again.
• p122 "You never lose your balance. What is your secret?" - "You are wrong," O Sensei replied. "I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it."
• p133 Sometimes what's difficult about the situation has a whole lot more to do with what's going on inside you than what's going on between you and the other person. In that case, a conversation focused on the interaction isn't going to be very illuminating or productive, at least until you've had a longer conversation with yourself.
• p137 There's nothing wrong with hoping for change. The urge to change others is universal. We want them to be more loving, to show more appreciation for our hard work, to give us more personal space, or to be more social at parties. To accept our career choice or our sexual orientation. To believe in our God or our views on important issues of the day.
• p143 An important barrier to letting go occurs when we integrate the conflict into our sense of who we are. In our mind's eye, we are the least favorite son, the long-suffering wife, part of the oppressed group. We define ourselves in relation to our conflict with others.
• p144 Difficult conversations operate at the core of our being - where the people and the principles we care about most intersect with our self-image and self-esteem.
• p145 What information do they see that we missed or don't have access to? What past experiences influence them? What is their reasoning for why they did what they did? What were their intentions? How did our actions impact them? What do they think we are contributing to the problem? What are they feeling? What does this situation mean to them? How does it affect their identity? What's at stake?
• p163 ... we have a deep desire to feel heard, and to know that others care enough to listen.
• p167 The single most important thing Greta has done is to shift her internal stance from "I understand" to "Help me understand."
• p168 Listening is only powerful and effective if it is authentic. ... The issue, then is this: Are you curious? Do you care?
• p169 Only when you're fully aware of your thoughts can you begin to manage them and focus on the other person.
• p181 Why is acknowledgment so important? Because attached to each expression of feelings is a set of invisible questions: "Are my feelings okay?" "Do you understand them?" "Do you care about them?" "Do you care about me?" These questions are important, and we have trouble moving on in the converstaion until we know the answers.
• p183 The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy. Empathy involves a shift from my observing how you seem on the outside, to imagining what it feels like to be you on the inside, wrapped in your skin with your set of experiences and background, and looking out at the world through your eyes.
• p185 In a difficult conversation your primary task is not to persuade, impress, trick, outwit, convert, or win over the other person. It is to express what you see and why you see it that way, how you feel, and maybe who you are. Self-knowledge and the belief that what you want to share is important will take you significantly further than eloquence and wit.
• p187 My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. ... --Audre Lorde
• p197 We go through the motions of trying, but incompetently, so that in the end we fail. We wait to speak until there's not enough time to deal with our concerns. We conveniently forget our materials. All our points suddenly disappear from our head. And voilà! All of our interests are satisfied: we can feel good about trying, and secretly satisfied that we didn't succeed. This is the art of self-sabotage.
• p188 Angela broke off her engagement because her fiancé was "too nice". He never stated a preference, never argued, never raised his voice, never asked for anything. While she appreciated his kindness, she felt something was missing: him.
• p191 This is unfortunately all too typical of many difficult conversations. We say the least important things, sometimes over and over again, and wonder why the other person doesn't realize what we really think and how we really feel.
• p193 Being disappointed that someone isn't reading our mind is one of our contributions to the problem.
• p200 The secret of powerful expression is recognizing that you are the ultimate authority on you. You are an expert on what you think, how you feel, and why you've come to this place. If you think it or feel it, you are entitled to say it, and no one can legitimately contradict you. You only get in trouble if you try to assert what you are not the final authority on - who is right, who intended what, what happened. Speak fully the range of your experience and you will be clear. Speak for yourself and you can speak with power.
• p232 "Life is just one damn thing after another."
• p239 Moreover, when memory is a factor, the level of uncertainty increases dramatically. Studies show that people are, on the whole, not very reliable witnesses, even when they are paying attention.
• p240 So inquire into their view looking for the sense rather than the nonsense in it. Paraphrase it back, share where and why you see it differently, and ask them for their reactions. Look for different information, different interpretations and ambiguous information, or different assumtions about missing information that help explain your differing views.
• p241 By the way, it's also worth asking yourself what you would have to learn to change your view.
• p242 In this sense, the critical question is less whether there is absolute truth than whether and how well we can perceive it. Perhaps the only thing a human being can be truly sure of is that one can't be completely sure. That is the realm of God, even if you don't believe in God.
• p242 Surprisingly often, an "obvious" and self-serving lie turns out to be a person's actual belief.
• There are times to give in - when you're persuaded the other person is right; when the other person cares a lot about the outcome and you care little; when any solution is better than no solution and you need an answer immediately. But as a long-term strategy for dealing with difficult behavior, it's not going to help. Giving in rewards bad behavior, and what gets rewarded gets repeated.
• p258 Control is the unilateral ability to make something happen. Influence is the ability yo affect someone else's thinking.
• p269 The phenomenon of an internal voice and the three conversations within it [The "What Happened?" Conversation, The Feelings Conversation, The Identity Conversation] seems to be a universal and fundamental aspect of being human. What does differ across cultures is whether, when, and how the internal voice is expressed.
• p278 And on the flip side, it is not negative feelings in themselves that distract us from productivity, but the failure to acknowledge them, and to deal with them directly, efficiently , and honestly.
• p284 Unresolved conflict in our work and personal relationships sucks up energy and attention in sneaky ways that we often don't take account of. We should be adding up the time we spend fuming to our spouses, designing a workaround, lying awake thinking about what we should have said to them, and looking up their personality disorders on the Internet to bolster our case.
• p285 Even if the friend can see what we're doing to make the situation worse, we rarely give them permission to challenge us - to help u see the other side's perspective and out own contribution.
• p293 Life is not easy. What we need is a little empathy for ourselves.
• p294 You're allowed to give up. As we've said, you can't change other people. When you finally give up the idea that you have the power to change others, you are giving up something you never had anyway - control. If someone is unwilling to examine their own contribution to a problem or take responsibility for the impact of their actions, you can't force them to. All you can do is take a hard look at yourself, be open to seeing things differently, change your own contribution, and be honest about what matters to you.

Here are my notes form book Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

• p4 The most fundamental revelation of this new discipline: we are wired to connect.
• p5 That link is a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on out health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.
• p7 In 2003 single-person households became the most common living arrangement in the United States. And while once families would gather together in the evening, now children, parents, and spouses find it increasingly difficult to spend time together.
• p10 The most telling news here may be that the social brain represents the only biological system in our bodies that continually attunes us to, and in turn becomes influenced by, the internal stato of people we're with. All other biological systems, from our lymphatic glands to our spleen, mainly regulate their activity in response to signals emerging from within the body, not beyond our skin. The pathways of the social brain are unique in their sensitivity to the world at large. Whenever we connect face to face (or voice to voice, or skin to skin) with someone else, our social brains interlock.
• p11 ... psychologist Edward Thorndike created the original formulation of "social intelligence." One way he defined it was as "the ability to understand and manage men and women," skills we all need to live well in the world.
• p12 The biological influence passing from person to person suggests a new dimension of a life well lived: conducting ourselves in ways that are beneficial even at this subtle level for those with whom we connect.
• p17 Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. --Robert Heinlein
• p19 When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression. --Edgar Allan Poe
• p23 Gardner admitted that one of the things that attracted her to the charming bigamist was what she called "that honest trait": he looked her directly in the eyes, smiling, even as he lied through his teeth.
• p34 But beneath this visible synchrony, the musicians are joined in a way an audience can never know: in their brains. If any two of those musicians were to have their neural activity measured during their rapture, it would show a remarkable synchronicity. For instance, when two cellists play the same bit of music, the rhythms of neural firing in their right hemispheres are extraordinary close. The synchrony of these zones for musical abilities is far greater across brains of the two than os the case for the left and right hemispheres within each brain.
• p37 These session are a kind of tutorial: the protoconversation marks a baby's first lesson in how to interact. We learn how to synchronize emotionally long before we have words for those feelings. Protoconversations remain our most basic template for interacting, a tacit awareness that quietly gets us in step as we link with someone else. The ability to get into synch as we did when we were babies serves us through life, guiding us in every social interaction.
• p43 Stern concludes that our nervous systems "are constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin." At such moments we resonate with their experience, and they with ours. We can no longer, Stern adds, "see our minds as so independent, separate and isolated," but instead we must view them as "permeable," continually interacting as though joined by an invisible link.
• p48 Plays, concerts and movies all let us enter a shared field of emotions with large number of strangers. Looping together in an upbeat register is, as psychologists like to say, "inherently reinforcing" - that is, it makes everyone feel good.
• p54 In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, out world contract as our problems and preoccupations look large. But when we focus on others, out world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.
• p57 As the legendary acting coach advised, "We must study other people and get as close to them emotionally as we can, until sympathy for them is translated into feelings of our own."
• p58 In today's psychology, the world "empathy" is used in three distinct senses: knowing another person's feelings; feeling what that person feels; and responding compassionately to another's distress. These three varieties of empathy seem to describe a 1-2-3 sequence: I notice you, I feel with you, and so I act to help you.
• p60 When we see someone else in distress, similar circuits reverberate in our brain, a kind of hardwired empathic resonance that becomes the prelude to compassion.
• p62 As Preston and de Waal note, In today's era of e-mail, commuting, frequent moves, and bedroom communities, the scales are increasingly tipped against the automatic and accurate perception of others' emotional state, without which empathy is impossible. Modern-day social and virtual distance have created an anomaly in human living, though one we now take to be the norm. This separation mutes empathy, absent which altruism falters.
• p63 Neuroscience now tells us something akin to the poetic idea that the eyes are windows on the soul: the eyes offer glimpses into a person's most private feelings. More specifically, the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly to a key brain structure for empathy and matching emotions, the orbitofrontal (or OFC) area of the prefrontal cortex.
• p69 The OFC, drawing on data such as context, strikes a balance between a primal impulse (get out of here) and what works best (make an acceptable excuse for leaving). We experience what the OFC decides not as a conscious understanding of the rules guiding the decision but as a feeling of "rightness." In short, the OFC helps guide what we do once we know how we feel about someone. By inhibiting raw impulse, the OFC orchestrates actions that serve us well - at the very least, by keeping us from doing or saying something we would regret.
• p74 Something like the out-of-place sex talk in the lab has been documented ever since the earliest years of the Internet: "flaming," in which adults make childishly offensive comments online. Ordinarily the high road keeps us within bounds. But the Internet lacks the sort of feedback the OFC needs to help us stay on track socially.
• p75 As we alter our perceptions, we can change our emotions.
• p76 Pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. --Marcus Aurelius
• p83 It's a display of the highest order of neural jujitsu, transforming the boys' shared emotional chemistry from a hostile range to a positive one -sheer relationship brilliance.
• p85 Even though we can stop talking, we cannot stop sending signals (our tone of voice, our fleeting expressions) about whet we feel. Even when people try to suppress all signs of their emotions, feelings have a way of leaking anyway. In this sense, when it comes to emotions, we cannot not communicate.
• p88 Listening well has been found to distinguish the best managers, teachers, and leaders.
• p94 Our society has subtle norms for who "should" express what emotions, implicitly constraining both men and women. In private life, women are generally perceived as more appropriately expressing fear and sadness, and men anger - a norm that tacitly approves of a woman crying openly but frowns on men shedding tears when upset. In professional situations, however, the taboo against crying extends to women. And when a woman holds a position of power, the prohibition on showing anger evaporates. On the contrary, a powerful leader is expected to display anger when a group's goal has been frustrated. Alpha women, it seems, meet the entrance requirement. Regardless of whether anger is the most effective response in a given moment, it does not seem socially out of place when it comes from the boss.
• p99 When I trusted my gut, I was more often right. As cognitive science tells us, we know more than we can say. To put it differently, this low-road job goes best when the high road just shuts up.
• p100 A focus on cognition about relationships neglects essential noncognitive abilities like primal empathy and synchrony, and it ignores capacities like concern. A purely cognitive perspective slights the essential brain-to-brain social glue that builds the foundation for any interaction.
• p101 Now social neuroscience challenges intelligence theorists to find a definition for our interpersonal abilities that encompasses the talents of the low road - including capacities for getting in sync, for attuned listening, and for empathic concern.
• p105 Beber coined the term "I-It" for the range of relations that runs from merely detached to utterly exploitative. In that spectrum others become objects: we treat someone more as a thing than as a person.
• p108 Amae points to the empirical fact that we attune most readily with the people in our lives we know and love - our immediate family and relatives, lovers or spouses, old friends. The closer we are, the more amae.
• p109 At the neural level, my "getting to know you" means my acquiring a resonance with with your emotional patterns and mental maps. And the more our maps overlap, the more identified we feel and the greater the shared reality we create.
• p117 The Dark Triad
• p117 "How could you do such a terrible thing to people? Didn't you feel any pity for them?" To which the killer replied very matter-of-factly, "Oh, no - I had to turn that part of me off. If I had felt any of their distress, I couldn't have done it."
• p117 When being tuned out of caring is a person's defining trait, they typically belong to one of the types that psychologists dub "the Dark Triad": narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths.
• p119 Such ambitious and self-confident leaders can be effective in the present cutthroat business world. The best are creative strategists who can grasp the big picture and navigate risky challenges to leave a positive legacy. Productive narcissists combine a justified self-confidence with openness to criticism - at least to criticism that comes from confidants.
• p122 The narcissistic organization becomes a moral universe of its own, a world where its goals, goodness, and means are not questioned but taken as holy writ. It's a world where doing whatever we need to, to get whatever we want, seems perfectly fine. The ongoing self-celebration fogs over how divorced from reality we've become. The rules don't apply to us, just to the others.
• p123 According to one standard test, a narcissist is someone who has a grandiose sense of self-importance, harbors obsessive fantasies of unbounded glory, feels rage or intense shame when criticized, expects special favors, and lacks empathy. That deficiency in empathy means narcissists remain oblivious to the self-centered abrasiveness that others see in them so clearly.
• p125 When Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince, the sixteenth-century manual for seizing and holding political power through cunning manipulation, he took for granted that the aspiring ruler had only his own interests at heart, caring not at all about the people he rules nor those he crushed to gain power. For Machiavellian, the ends justify the means, no matter what human pain he may cause.
• p128 The coolheadedness means that psychopaths can be dangerous in ways rarely seen in Machs or narcissists. Because psychopaths feel no anticipatory fears, staying utterly calm under even the most intense pressure, they are virtually oblivious to the threat of punishment. This indifference to consequences that keep others lawabiding makes psychopaths the most likely candidates for prison among the Dark Triad.
• p129 Like Machs, psychopaths can be adept at social cognition, learning to get inside someone's head to surmise their thoughts and feelings so they can "push all the right buttons." They can be socially smooth, believing that "even when others are upset with me, I can usually win them over with my charm." Some criminal psychopaths make a point of reading self-help books to better learn how to manipulate their targets - something like a "paint-by-numbers" approach to getting what they want.
• p131 The basic emotions of anger, fear, and joy are all hardwired into the brain or soon afterward, but social emotions require self-consciousness, a capacity that begins to emerge in the second year of life as a child's orbitofrontal region grows more mature. At around fourteen months babies start recognizing themselves in a mirror. This recognition of oneself as a unique entity brings the reciprocal understanding that other people are separate too - and the ability to feel mortified about what others may think of us.
• p131 But as the realization dawns that she is a separate person, someone others can notice, she has all the ingredients for feeling embarrassed - typically a child's first social emotion. It requires her to be aware not only of how others feel about her, but of how she ought to feel in turn.
• p134 Freud proposed that all jokes juxtapose two different frames on reality.
• p134 This ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else's mind is one of our most invaluable human skills.
• p135 Children younger than eighteen months will generally offer the snack they like; older ones will offer the snack you preferred. The older toddlers have recognized that their own likes and dislikes can differ from other people's, and that others may think differently than they.
• p136 As growing children master these social lessons - typically in their fourth year - their empathy approaches that of an adult. With this maturity, part of innocence ends: children become clear about the difference between what they merely imagine and what actually happens.
• p136 Mind sight stands as a prerequisite for younger children's ability to joke, or to get a joke. Teasing, tricks, lying, and being mean all demand this same sense of the other's inner world. Deficiency in these capacities sets autistic children apart from those who develop a normal social repertoire.
• p138 We are all mindreaders.
• p139 Baron-Cohen devised a test to determine how easily someone senses what others feel. The test is called the EQ, for "empathy quotient", and women on average outscore men. Women also outscore men measures of social cognition like understanding what would be a faux pas in a given social situation, and on empathic accuracy, intuiting what another person would be feeling or thinking. Finally women tend to outscore men on Baron-Cohen's test of reading a person's feelings from their eyes alone. But when it comes to systems thinking, the advantage tips to the male brain.
• p152 Like a plant adapting to rich or to depleted soil, a child's brain shapes itself to fit its social ecology, particularly the emotional climate fostered by the main people in her life.
• p189 In the terrain of the human heart, scientists tell us, at least three independent but interrelated brain systems are at play, all moving us in their own way. To untangle love's mysteries, neuroscience distinguishes between neural networks for attachment, for care giving, and for sex. Each is fueled by a different set of brain chemicals and hormones, and each runs through a disparate neuronal circuit. Each adds its own chemical spice to the many varieties of love. Attachment determines who we turn to for succor; these are the people we miss the most when they are absent. Care giving gives us the urge to nurture the people for whom we feel most concern. When we are attached, we cling; when we are care giving we provide. And sex is, well, sex. ... When attachment entwines with caring and sexual attraction, we can savor full-blown romance. But when any of these three goes missing, romantic love stumbles.
• p192 Panksepp finds a neural corollary between the dynamics of opiate addiction and our dependence on the people fro whom we feel our strongest attachments. All positive interactions with people, he proposes, owe part of their pleasure to the opioid system, the very circuitry that links with heroin and other addictive substances.
• p193 Panksepp theorizes that the gratification that addicts get from their drugs biologically mimics the natural pleasure we get from feeling connected to those we love; the neural circuitry for both are largely shared. Even animals, he finds, prefer to spend time with those in whose presence they have secreted oxytocin and natural opioids, which induce a relaxed serenity - suggesting that these brain chemicals cement our family ties and friendships as well as our love relationships.
• p193 That poignant exchange illustrates how differences in attachment styles can put a couple out of synch - in dealing not only with a shared trauma but with virtually everything else.
• p199 "Men look for sex objects, and women for success objects."
• p204 "What does women want?" As Epstein answers, "She wants a partner who cares what she wants."
• p218 On the other hand, something rather remarkable tends to happen with couples who live together for decades, finding happiness with each other. Their continual rapport even seems to leave its mark on their faces, which comes to resemble each other, apparently a result of the sculpting of facial muscles, as partners smile or frown in unison they strengthen the parallel set of muscles.
• p219 "Indifference - not caring about, or even paying attention to, your mate - is one of the worst forms of cruelty in marriage."
• p219 In dating couples, the most important predictor of whether the relationship will last is how many good feelings the couple shares. In marriages, it's how well the couple can handle their conflicts. And in the later years of a long marriage, it's again how many good feelings the couple shares.
• p232 The social brain makes a crucial distinction between accidental and intentional harm, and it reacts more strongly if it seems malevolent.
• p273 The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to ongoing emotional distress, because of the damaging effects of cortisol. Under prolonged stress, cortisol attacks the neurons of the hippocampus, slowing the rate at which neurons are added or even reducing the total number, with a disastrous impact on learning.
• p275 Many effective leaders sense that - like compliments - well-titrated doses of irritation can energize. The measure of how well callibrated a message of displeasure might be is whether it moves people toward their performance peak or plummets them past the tipping point into the zone where distress corrodes performance.
• p278 No child can avoid emotional pain while growing up, and likewise emotional toxicity seems to be a normal by-product of organizational life - people are fired, unfair policies come from headquarters, frustrated employees turn in anger on others.
• p281 "So often behavior problems are because a student feels insecure about being unable to do the work," Pamela told me. "Maeva couldn't even sound out words. I was shocked she had gotten to sixth grade without learning how to read."
• p299 Once the others are set at a psychological distance, they can become a target for hostility.
• p300 But once a negative bias begins, out lenses become clouded. We tend to seize on whatever seems to confirm the bias and ignore what does not. Prejudice, in this sense, is a hypothesis desperately trying to prove itself to us. And so when we encounter someone to whom the prejudice might apply, the bias skews our perception, making it impossible to test whether the stereotype actually fits. Openly hostile stereotypes about a group - to the extent they rest on untested assumptions - are mental categories gone awry.
• p304 Pettigrew said. "For example, acts of violence against minorities are much more frequent in the former East Germany than West. When we studied those arrested for such violence, we found two things: they are intensely prejudice, and they have had virtually no conntect with the groups they hate so much."
• p306 From social psychology he knew one dynamic of moving from Them to Us: as people from hostile groups work together toward a common goal, they end up liking one another.
• p318 Vitality arises from sheer human contact, especially from loving connections. The people we are about most are an elixir of sorts, and ever-renewing source of energy. The neural exchange between a parent and child, a grandparent and a toddler, between lovers or a satisfied couple, or among good friends, has palpable virtues.
• p319 "We must love one another or die." --W. H. Auden

Here are my notes from book "A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying" by J. A. Barnes.

• p2 Let not my readers imagine, that I propose writing a panegyric upon the art of lying. It were absurd to recommend to mankind, what is already in such universal esteem. In court it assumes the name of good breeding; in religion it is called pious fraud, it is mystery in trade, and invetion in poetry. In our political contests it is stiled opposition, liberty, and patriotism.
• p4 By far the greater part of what philosophers have written treats lying as a form of deviance, and not something as an instance of conforming to special norms and expectations.
• p7 The ubiquity of lying prompts the question: Why should we ever tell the truth? But while this normative inquiry may be appropriate for moral philosophy, social science is more properly concerned with answering slightly different questions: not why should but why do we so often tell the truth, and when do we not do so? For we find empirically that , in societies and cultures of great diversity, with their distinctive codes of religion and ethics, the truth is told more often than not.
• p7 So large is the Empire of Truth, that it hath place within the walls of Hell, and the Devils themselves are daily forced to practise it; ... in Moral verities, although they deceive us, they lie not unto each other; as well understanding that all community is continued by Truth, and that of Hell cannot consist without it.
• p8 Learning to lie properly is an important feature of the process of human socialization, for we have innumerable good accounts of adults, in a wide variety of social and cultural contexts, exercising their social skills in telling the right lies at the right time, and to the right people.
• p13 As well as being categorized as successful or unsuccessful by reference to outcome, lies can be classified in terms of the intentions of the liar. From this standpoint, lies are often referred to as white, social or altruistic if the intentions of the liar intends to do harm. Protective lies may be constructed to shield the interests of some other person, who may or may not be the dupe, but they are often designed to protect the liar, without necessarily harming anyone.
• p16 You tell the first lie of the day when you put your clothes on.
• p23 Ambassador - an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.
• p23 An absence of mutual trust may lead to an abundance of lies, each party trying to deceive the other, but the presence of trust does not necessarily result in an absence of lies. In intimate face-to-face relations the shared expectation of mutual trust may lead to collaboration between, or more likely connivance by liar and dupes in order to maintain the plausibility or a lie, as well as the plausibility of continuing trust. When this happens it is no longer obvious who is deceiving whom.
• p26 Propaganda - The branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without deceiving your enemies.
• p30 Politics - The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.
• p30 Q. How can you tell when politician is lying? A. When he moves his lips.
• p33 George Washington couldn't tell a lie, Richard Nixon couldn't tell the truth, Ronald Reagan couldn't tell the difference.
• p42 Many peasant legal systems are likewise concerned with reaching acceptable compromise outcomes rather than arriving at some constituted truth, even when dealing disputes that are not centered on the family. ... They cared about ending conflicts, to forestall supernatural vengeance. The compromise solutions they reached 'may be based on outright lies, which everyone knows are lies but which offer the only possible route to agreement'.
• p54 In warfare lies are taken for granted: in politics lying may be perceived as frequent, but occurs in the face of protests and is regretted; in bureaucracies protective lying is legitimate but other kinds of lies are not; academics usually assume that references, favourable and unfavourable alike, have been written in good faith even when doubting their validity. When people move from one domain to another, they may have to adjust their expectations of the truthfulness of others, as well as their own level of truthfulness.
• p67 In Russian culture a distinction is drawn between two kinds of lies, vranyo and lozh which do not have exact parallels in English. Vranyo has been claimed as uniquely Russian, and seems to consist of telling untrue but credible stories, a practice not condemned by those who recognize what is going on.
• p68 Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie.
• p71 The world is a lie my friend, all of it's a lie.
• p72 Mediterranean societies, Peristiany refers to 'the defensive use of deception and the offensive use of ridicule', with secrecy as the other major defensive strategy used by families jealous of their honour.
• p73 In the defensive category are lies told to conceal an inability to live up to the highest requirements of the social code, either by oneself or by one's family, and those told to conceal unintentional failures, such as being poor or being turned down in a projected marriage match.
• p75 Campbell, who studied the sheep-herding Sarakatsani, notes the distinction they made between young unmarried shepherds and older men who were heads of households. Young men were pure and 'innocent in the sense of freedom from guilt or the need to use guile'. They were free of contamination from women who possessed 'the ability to deceive their men "forty times each day"'. For a household head, however, 'Deceit and lies are always needed'. As protector of his family and his flock, he should have 'the skill to plot with guile and craft'. He 'must continually use lies'. Indeed, Campbell says 'men lie as a matter of habit and principle to deny other people information'.
• p81 The value of truth-telling is very high. A sharp line is drawn between in-group and out-group. Truth is for the in-group. Lying to outsiders or performing other negative acts toward them will either be given different names or different evaluations, or both.
• p81 An individual who can be duped in one situation as an outsider may in different circumstances become an insider who must be treated truthfully. Not all fellow members of the moral community are treated alike; relative status within the community has to be taken into account.
• p83 Untruths provide weapons for the weak to resist the strong and for the strong to moderate the antagonism that their dominance provokes from the weak.
• p84 These remarks may be lies, but are told because the liar hopes that falsely inflated estimates of their ability will make dupes happy and encourage them to do better next time.
• p86 ... since a man with then wives can have more children than could a woman with ten husbands ... men have more often been in a position in which self-deceiving up has been to their reproductive advantage .. and self-deceiving down has more frequently been to the advantage of females...
• p88 Hartung writes that only in humans does the self have 'social interaction with itself, controlling information transfer between the conscious and subconscious in order to manipulate its own behavior, ...' and Fingarette identifies 'man's enormous capacity for self-deception' as one of the most salient human characteristics.
• p90 Durandin comments that 'lies of justification' in particular take the form of an inner dialogue. We can make excuses for ourselves to ourselves; we also sometimes have to make excuses for ourselves to others.
• p90 If you are going to lie about something, eventually you have to believe it in order to live with yourself.
• p92 I couldn't tolerate my sense of guilt at being that dishonest. So I began to say, 'Well, if he weren't such a bastard. If he didn't yell all the time'. I kept on rationalizing in order to make it okay for me to be doing what I was doing. In the beginning... I didn't even start to think about morally. I just felt that I was not telling him to protect him.
• p92 'Doublethink' is holding 'simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them' and is a process that is conscious and unconscious at the same time.
• p92 ... Dan Bradley, who, he says, 'had long since accepted the idea that homosexuality was powerful enough to twist a person into any shape and to make him lie to himself and anyone else, as necessary'. Bradley eventually declared publicly that he was homosexual, but many of the other secretly gay men discussed by Branch showed more of that firmness of purpose envisaged by Orwell. Where it occurred, it took the form of active support for the repression of homosexuality; as Branch puts it, they 'flew broomsticks to the witch-hunt'.
• p93 Only self-deception is likely to create a semblance of truthfulness, ... the more successful a liar is, the more people he has convinced, the more likely it is that he will end by believing his own lies.
• p95 Perhaps the ability to succeed in public life is linked to an ability to believe one's own lies without continual inner conflict.
• p97 Self-deception promotes short-run psychological health and adaptive decisions. It also helps maintain the sociental status quo, thus promoting political stability. Long-run psychological health and beneficial social change, however, are thereby constrained.
• p99 But as much as I wanted to be a detective and find him out, I didn't want to either. Because the truth, I was afraid more of the truth than living in the lie kind of.
• p100 I had words with her and it was like we both knew this was going on and we didn't let on that we knew ... We were talking about the weather as far as our conversation was going, but there was a lot more going on. And I was aware of it and she was aware of it ... Although we never talked right on the subject, I talked about how much I care about him ... giving her messages that I was not about to give him up, for her or anybody else, although never actually coming out and saying it, nor she asking.
• p101 One interesting feature of the above account is that R2 seemed not to place a high value on her relation to her husband, except in the context of appearing to compete with the other woman for her husband's affection. She said: 'But I got very competitive with her, very competitive', even though ' around [my husband] I had no feeling of self-worth and I had low self-esteem'
• p102 What! you little liar! You knew we weren't telling you the truth and didn't tell us!
• p113 Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. 'Where are you going?' asked one. 'To Cracow', was the answer. 'What a liar you are!' broke out the other. 'If you say you're going to Cracow, you want me to believe you're going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you're going to Cracow. So why are you lying yo me?'
• p132 The frame provides license. A lie revealing itself as a lie is not called a lie but a fiction.
• p139 People are much happier when you agree with them and tell them what they want to hear.
• p140 A truth that is told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
• p141 He is such a fool that he will tell the truth without any reason at all.
• p143 In very simple circumstances the lie is often more harmless in regard to the maintenance of the group than under more complex conditions. Primitive man who lives in a small group ... surveys and controls the material of his life more easily and completely than does the man of higher cultures. ... the practice of his life is guided in the main by those few facts and circumstances of which his narrow angle of vision permits him to gain directly a correct view. In a richer and larger cultural life, however, existence rests on a thousand premises which a single individual cannot trace and verify to their roots at all, but must take on faith. Our modern life is based to a much larger extent than is usually realized upon the faith in the honesty of the other ... Under modern circumstances, the lie, therefore, becomes something much more devastating than it was earlier, something which questions the very foundations of out life ... modern life is a 'credit economy' in a much broader than economic sense. --Georg Simmel
• p145 The lie is a technique for the restriction of the social distribution of knowledge over time, and is thus ultimately woven into the system of power and control in society.
• p151 Together with Machiavellian skill and its associated theories of mind, the ability to deceive is facilitated by the ability to indulge in fantasy.
• p154 Tension between its sincere and deceptive uses is unavoidable. Locke was not entirely mistaken in saying that 'men find pleasure to be deceived', yet most of the time people dislike being lied to. They feel that the liar is trying to manipulate them, and any trust that may have had in him or her is undermined. Hence they have a hostile attitude to lying, even if they also tell lies.
• p161 Thus, though we might prefer to contemplate a world in which all citizens were adequately empowered to detect and expose the lies told to deceive them, we have to recognize that in the real world the ability to detect and expose, like all other aspects of lying, is closely related to the distribution of power.
• p163 The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way... --Samuel Butler
• p164 Perhaps more importantly, the removal of the stigma attached to lying should make it easier for individuals to admit to themselves that they too, like everyone else, tell lies from time to time. If easiest person of all to deceive is oneself, then to avoid this hazard we need all the Machiavellian skill we can muster. Machiavellian skill is definitely an asset that contributes to general well-being. But that other asset, the enhanced capacity for deception that comes as part of the package, must be used only with moderation and restraint. This caveat is particularly relevant in those domains of social life where some use of deception is regarded as legitimate. The danger of counter-productive lying are greatest for politicians, police officers, bureaucrats and those in similar occupations where lying in the course of duty is something called for. We cannot assume that an optimal distribution of honesty and deceit will be reached, even in the long run, by any automatic tendency towards social equilibrium.

My notes from book The Cloud of Unknowing

• p5 And in the name of love, I ask, whoever you are, however this book came into your hands - maybe you own it, have borrowed it, are delivering it to someone else, or are safekeeping it for other - regardless, I beg you in the powerful name of love, it at all possible don't read it to anyone or copy it or quote from it, and don't let anyone else read it, copy it, or quote from it, unless, in your opinion, that person is sincere in their intention to follow Christ.
• p9 You're human, so watch out for that enemy, pride. Never think you're holier or better than anyone else. Never confuse the worthiness of your calling with who you are. Don't think that, just because you're at the third, or singular level, you're more important than others. In fact, if you don't live out your calling, empowered by grace and good advice, the opposite will be true. You'll be worse off, more miserable and cut off from community than you can imagine. So let grade and wise instruction lead you to the good in your soul and then act on that good.
• p10 I especially want you to remember this: God is a jealous lover. He will not share you, so don't give yourself to anyone but him. He's unwilling to work in your will unless you're willing to be entirely his, and his alone. He's not asking for your help. He's asking for you.
• p12 They will always keep you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling him fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions. So, be sure you make your home in this darkness.
• p13 Every moment of time is a gift to you, and one day you'll be asked how you spent each one.
• p17 I do not want people sitting around analyzing, racking their brains, their curiosity forcing their imagination to go entirely the wrong way. It's not wise for the mind, and it's not healthy for the body. These people are dangerous deluded, and it would take a miracle to save them.
• p28 So let go of every clever, persuasive thought. Put it down and cover it with a thick cloud of forgetting. No matter how sacred, no thought can ever promise to help you in the work of contemplative prayer, because only love - not knowledge - can help us reach God. As long as you are a soul living in a mortal body, your intellect, no matter how sharp and spiritually discerning, never sees God perfectly. The mind is always distorted in some way, warping our work; and at its worst, our intellect can lead us to great error.
• p33 For example, if you find yourself obsessing on someone, on some physical injury, or on some painful conversation, you risk becoming a bitter person obsessed with revenge, which is the sin of anger. If you let your soul feel total contempt and loathing for someone, and it you're always insulting and censuring them in your mind, you're living with envy. If you give in to a feeling of malaise and exhaustion, that's laziness. On the other hand, if you find yourself entertaining ideas so pleasant that you could rest in them forever, only yo realize that these thoughts are all about your own natural goodness, accomplishments, intelligence, talents, position, or beauty, this is pride. And if you dwell on your wealth and what you own (or want to own), then that's greed. If you're preoccupied with lots and lots of food and drink and only the best will do, you know gluttony. And if you're seduced by an inordinate love of giving or receiving flattery and by a deep-seated need to be liked, or by sexual pleasures, this is lust.
• p39 Get to know yourself. Yes, it is backbreaking labor. Embrace it. Through it, you'll experience God as he is. I don't mean you'll know God completely. That's not possible for anyone on earth. Nor do I mean you'll know him as you will in the absolute joy of eternity, when body and soul are truly on. But when you get to know yourself better as the mortal human you are, your soul grows in humility, and you'll know God as fully as possible on earth.
• p42 For both of us, the best way to grow in humility is not through reflecting on our weaknesses but by remembering God's goodness and love.
• p63 In the work of contemplation, however, there's no time for analyzing people into the categories of friends or enemy, relative or stranger. Yes, of course you'll continue to feel closer to some than to others. It's only natural, and there's nothing wrong with that. Love has its reasons. Look at Christ. He felt a deeper affection for John, Mary, and Peter than for others. That's fine, but what I'm saying is that during the work of contemplation, you should feel the same intimate love for everyone, because your only reason to love is God. Plain and simple, all people must be loved for God, and they must be loved just as well as you love yourself.
• p70 However, don't be surprised if sometimes those we consider the "worst" sinners - I mean people who've done horrible things - advance more quickly in this work than those we regard as relatively "innocent." These are merciful miracles of out Lord. God is generous with his grace, and the world looks on, astonished.
• p71 My point is - don't judge. No person on earth should be judged by another. Nobody can say whether what someone else does is "good" or "evil." That said, yes, you can scrutinize a person's actions, weigh them in your mind, and determine whether the deeds themselves are good or evil, but you cannot judge the person.
• p72 Judge yourself as you want - that's between you and God or your spiritual director - but leave others alone.
• p77 Still, accept that you will always have to work hard, because every day you will encounter fresh temptations springing up from original sin, and you are responsible for beating them back with the awesome, sharp, double-edged sword or discernment. Through such experiences, you learn that this life offers no real security and no lasting rest.
• p79 In short, let God's grace do with you what it wants. Let it lead you wherever it wishes. Let it work and you receive. Look on it, watch it, and leave it alone. Don't meddle with it, trying to help, as if you could assist grace. Fear that your interference could wreck everything. Instead, be the tree, and let it e the carpenter. Be the house, and let it be the homeowner living there. Become blind during contemplative prayer and cut yourself off from needing to know things.
• p80 No routine leads to love.
• p83 Your ability to reason is never helpful in contemplation.
• p97 Watch how a true lover acts. When you are perfect in love, you always love your beloved more than yourself. In fact, in many ways you'll neglect yourself to serve the one you love. That's how you should handle yourself.
• p100 To be aware you're alive is genuinely painful, but if you're fortunate enough to feel not merely who you are but that you are, you understand more than others do why sorrow is universal and inescapable.
• p116 Be careful not to interpret literally what I mean spiritually.
• p124 However, some people are so insecure that they focus all of their energy on their reputations, so they deliberately inject their conversations with humble-sounding words and fake loving gestures.
• p125 The devil won't tempt them with anything obviously evil; instead, he makes them act like zealous church leaders keeping watch over every aspect of our Christian life or like an abbot overseeing his monks. These people criticize all people for their faults, as if they were really pastors, legally responsible for the care of others' souls. They believe God requires this from them and that they dare not stop. Then they say that God's love and a desire to help others moves them to point out others' imperfections, but they lie. The fire of hell has ignited their brains and their imaginations.
• p126 People with this strength learn to distinguish good from evil, bad from worse, and good from better, before passing judgment on anything they've heard or seen.
• p147 Like reason, will, and imagination, sensuality and its objects are contained in the mind.
• p155 So, work diligently in this nothing, which is nowhere.
• p156 When we reach the end of what we know, that's where we find God.
• p173 When you consider God, think only that he is as he is, and when you focus on yourself, be simply aware that you are as you are.
• p175 Learning to focus, not on what you are, but that you are.
• p192 But where can we find someone so completely rooted in faith, so totally humble in the awareness of their nothingness, and so happily led and nurtured by our Lord's love, that they fully experience God's omnipotence, unknowable wisdom, and awesome goodness?
• p203 The burden of self is larger even than all the misery of the world. Nothing compares. You become your own cross. Bearing this burden is the way of contemplation, and it leads us to our Lord, as he says: First "let a person take up his or her own cross" (in the agony of self-awareness) and then "follow me," as he promises, "into the joy and onto the summit of spiritual maturity, where you'll taste the sweet gentleness of my love in the sublime experience of my divine person."
• p204 When I say "my self," I don't mean my activities, for I'm not what I do, and I'm not what I've done. Some people confuse the two. They so identify with their accomplishments that they assume these are who they are, but the doer and the deed are two separate entities. The same is true of God. He is not his works. God is God.
• p209 Don't evaluate or discuss God's decisions, or anyone else's, for that matter. You can only know for yourself whether God is moving in your soul and calling you to perfection or not. Everyone has a unique calling, and it's none of your business what God calls others to do.
• p218 You're in a little ship crossing a vast spiritual ocean, leaving behind your focus on physical and heading toward the life of the spirit. Along the way you'll meet countless overwhelming storms and endless temptations. You'll feel alone and depressed, with nowhere to tun for help. You'll think you've lost God.
• p202 Here's how God works. When these comforting emotions, or signs of his grace, are absent, you learn patience. When they're present, your spirit is nourished by joy, and grow. Together, these twin experiences teach you much. You learn to bow to every situation, happy to obey the demands or spiritual maturity and your union with God's will. This is perfect love. You will eventually reach a point where you no longer care whether you experience the absence of these pleasant feelings or their presence. Always accepting God's will, even when these graceful emotions are absent, you will be just as happy and just as joyful then as you would be if they were with you every moment of every day of your entire life.

My notes from book A Matter of Wonder: What Biology Reveals About Us, Our World, and Our Dreams written by Gottfried Schatz

• p2 Brain cells respire faster than all other body cells and, relative to their weight, produce ten thousand times more energy per second then sun.
• p3 Poisonous waste, though, always stimulates the inventiveness of evolution - and so it did not take long for cells to find a way to use oxygen gas to burn the organic remains of other cells and to live on the energy of that combustion. Cell respiration entered the scene.
• p7 Should I be lucky - or unlucky - enough to live to be ninety, every single one of my muscle cells will have to get by with up to ten times less energy than in my youth. But it is mu brain and its outward extensions - the retinas of my eyes - that face the worst prospects. Their mitochondrial fires burn especially fast, so they feel the full force of any imperfections in my mitochondria and age more quickly than other tissues in my body.
• p8 When mitochondria are so badly damaged that they can no longer meet the cells energy needs, they emit chemical signals that order the cell to kill itself. The cell then digests itself, packs its remains into little membrane sacks and leaves these as prey for roving scavenger cells. This cellular hara-kiri produces neither messy waste nor inflammation of the surrounding tissue - the cell orchestrates its suicide as carefully as it did its growth and division. What could provide more vivid proof that life and death are inseparable parts of a greater whole?
• p11 We humans have not one but two hereditary systems - one chemical and one cultural. The chemical system is based on strands of DNA molecules and other components of our cells; it determines what we can be. The cultural system consists of the dialogue between generations; it determines what we then become. Our chemical system barely sets us apart from animals, but our cultural system has no equal in nature.
• p15 But Toxoplasma might still alter our minds in subtle ways: preliminary and still unconfirmed studies suggest that infected women tend to be more intelligent, dynamic, and independent, while infected men are more jealous, conservative, and group conscious. In both sexes, the parasite makes us more likely to feel guilty, which many psychologists consider a negative emotional disposition.
• p17 Yet who will protect us from immaterial parasites that take over our thoughts and emotions? They are numerous - racism, religious fanaticism, national hysteria, spiritualism, and superstition.
• p24 But what about the torments of psychological pain? Our society is usually only willing to recognize and fight it when someone is obviously mentally ill.
• p30 Leprosy may not have learned how to resist our drugs yet, but it can still hide behind poverty and ignorance.
• p32 Whoever wants to develop a strong character must be willing not only to learn new things, but also to put familiar things aside. This is not just true for us humans. According to the musician Pierre Boulez, the willingness to disregard tradition is a measure of a culture's strength. And the alteration or destruction of inherited genes is part of the development of all novel organisms.
• p40 For genes, saying nothing is just as vital as saying the right thing. Even they know the virtue of silence.
• p53 Am I alone? Can I share with others the world I see and perceive? Or am I a prisoner of my senses and the poverty of my language?
• p53 And in fact, biology does teach me that I am firmly embedded within the rich web of life that covers our planet. But it also tells me that every human being tastes, smells, sees, and feels the world differently - which also offers me the conforming knowledge that my senses make me unique.
• p61 In contrast, some women even have a fourth color sensor and can distinguish up to a hundred million colors.
• p64 I am a late scion within this aristocratic lineage of highly organized matter. This lineage is over 3.5 billion years old - plenty of reason to be proud of it.
• p68 Much about us and our world is mysterious and dark, and the darkness of our prejudices is more threatening than that of our oceans.
• p69 What would the world look like if we could see ultraviolet or infrared light, hear ultrasound, and feel electric fields or the earth's magnetic field?
• p115 One of the fascinating aspects of life is that we still know so little about it.
• p126 Today, I consist of about ten trillion human cells and about ten to twenty times as many bacterial cells. Are these bacteria part of me - or only parasites? Where does my self end?
• p131 Whoever takes his own self too seriously and timidly seals off its boundaries will distort his own perspective on the world's diversity and fall prey to primitive tribalism. This is as true for individuals as it is for peoples, nations, and cultures.
• p139 In the past two decades, we have decoded many of the chemical signals that cells and tissues use to steer growth and healing. Most of this communication takes place between the cells' surfaces, which constantly emit protein molecules that attach themselves to other cells and give them orders: 'Stop growing immediately; I'm here now', or 'Grow as fast as you can toward me so we can form a tissue together', or even 'Kill yourself; you're in my way'.
• p148 Bacteria read their genomes; we interpret ours. We are like musicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who could make any given basso continuo sound quite different by approaching it in a different way.
• p148 Further, our brain cells seem to chemically change some of their proteins in response to environmental stimuli, so the variations of our cell proteins are practically boundless.
• p149 Perhaps we have to come up with completely new kinds of thinking to understand systems of such complexity.
• p150 That is, the environment talks to and can change our genes. Is this interplay precisely steered - or is it a game of chance? And if even the environment can play games with our genome, perhaps we do, too, without knowing it.
• p152 In its quest for diversity, life clearly does everything it can to fight the tyranny of genes.
• p156 Louis Pasteur, the chemist, became one of the greatest doctors of all time. The foundation of his genius was his insight that an illness can only really be cured when its causes are known.
• p160 Today, biomedical research is the engine of the mighty pharmaceutical industry, devouring ever greater sums. In many fields, research itself has become big business. When a taxpayer sees imposing research institutions popping up everywhere and learns from the media that such institutions have budgets of millions and millions, sooner o later he will wonder what they have achieved.
• p161 Impatience, I would add, is one of science's archenemies, and good scientific research is as patient as true love.
• p165 Today, when I lie awake at night and follow the trail of my memories, I miss that silence, for the voices of the night start troubling me with their questions.
• p166 I wanted to become a scientist in order to learn what the world around me is made of. But I soon realized that scientific truth can very quickly prove to be false.
• p166 Science does not reveal definitive truths but a way to approach truth. It is not about collecting and organizing facts but about believing that we can understand the world through observation, experiments, and reflection.

My notes from book Zen in the Martial Arts written by Joe Hyams

• p2 The martial arts began to develop this emphasis on personal spiritual growth in the sixteenth century, when the need for fighting skills in the Orient diminished. The martial arts were transformed from a practical means of combat-to-the death to spiritual educational training that emphasized the personal development of the participant.
• p6 In more than twenty years of studying the martial arts I have not retired to a Zen monastery nor retired from the pressures of working and living in a competitive society. But I have found that when I attain the spiritual goals of the martial arts, the quality of my life has been dramatically altered - enriching my relationships with people, as well as keeping me in closer touch with my self. I have come to see that enlightenment simply means recognizing the inherent harmony of ordinary life.
• p7 Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.
• p11 "Like this cup," the master said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
• p16 To be patient is to have the capacity of calm endurance. To give yourself time is to actively work toward a goal without setting a limit on how long you will work.
• p17 For the uncontrolled there is no wisdom, nor for the uncontrolled is there the power of concentration; and for him without concentration there is no peace. And for the unpeaceful, how can there be happiness?
• p19 By living in the present you are in full contact with yourself and your environment, your energy is not dissipated and is always available. In the present there are no regrets as there are in the past. By thinking od the future, you dilute the present. The time to live is now.
• p23 "It leads to this," he said. "Those who are patient in the trivial things in life and control themselves will one day have the same mastery in great and important things."
• p28 I protested. "But the fact still remains that my real competition is the advancing years." "Stop comparing yourself at forty-five with the man you were at twenty of thirty," Bruce answered. "The past is an illusion. You must learn to live in the present and accept yourself for what you are now. What you lack in flexibility and agility you must make up with knowledge and constant practice."
• p32 Only by exposing myself to someone better than I have I been able to improve. It is inspiring to know that even the masters have masters, and that we are all learners.
• p36 It is always better to improve and strengthen your own line of knowledge than to try and cut your opponent's line.
• p39 "To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner," he said. "We are spending it during lessons just as we are spending it now in conversation. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever." "It's the most precious commodity we have," agreed Sterling. "I always view my time as divided into infinite moments or transactions or contacts. Anyone who steals my time is stealing my life because they are taking my existence from me. As I get older, I realize that time is the only thing I have left. So when someone comes to me with a project, I estimate the time it will take me to do it and then I ask myself, 'Do I want to spend weeks or months of what little time I have on this project? Is it worth it or am I just wasting my time?' If I consider the project time-worthy I do it. I apply the same yardstick to social relations. I will not permit people to steal my time. I have limited my friends to those people with whom time passes happily. There are moments in my life - necessary moment - when I don't do anything but what is my choice. The choice of how I spend my time is mine, and it is not dictated by social convention."
• p44 The masters of good phrasing, like good martial artists, are men who pay much attention to pause and silence (nonaction) as to action.
• p45 I had discovered that doing nothing can sometimes be more important than doing something.
• p50 "Now you have seen the power of controlled patience on the mat," he said. "The same thing applies to problems in life. When a problem arise, don't fight with it or try to deny it. Accept and acknowledge it. Be patient in seeking a solution or opening, and then fully commit yourself to the resolution you think advisable."
• p55 "The center for ki is the 'one point' or tai-ten," she said, pointing to a spot about an inch and a half below her navel. "This is about where the center of gravity for human body is. Ki is defined as an energy or inner strength that can be directed from the 'one point' through visualization to places outside the body. It can be combined with gravity to produce dead weight and extreme heaviness within the body, as in the case of the child who does not want to be lifted. Aikidoists, as well as most martial artists and Zen practitioners, believe that all of the ki, or energy, of the universe flows through them at this 'one point,' traveling forever in all directions. No matter where you are, you are always the center of the universe. By holding you 'one point' and remaining centered, you feel one with the universe and, at the same time, totally aware of your bodily relationship to the universe."
• p66 "When someone hits you, he is extending his ki toward you and it starts to flow when he thinks he will hit you - even before his body moves. His action is directed by his mind. You don't need to deal with his body at all if you can redirect his mind and the flow of his ki. That's the secret; lead his mind away from you and the body will follow."
• p69 It's not bad to have aggressive or hostile thoughts and feelings towards others. When you acknowledge these feelings you no longer have to pretend to be that which you are not. You can learn to accept these moods. What is bad, however, is letting them dictate your nature. When you unleash your aggression or hostility on another person, it inspires aggression and hostility in return. The result then is conflict, which all true martial artists try to avoid. Anger doesn't demand action. When you act in anger, you lose self-control. How can you expect to control someone else if you cannot control yourself?
• p71 Control your emotion or it will control you.
• p75 I can defeat you physically with or without a reason. But I can only defeat your mind with a reason. --Jim Lau
• p81 It' killed him, not me.
• p82 It' is the state of mind the Japanese refer to as mushin, which literally means 'no-mind.' According to the Zen masters, mushin is operating when the actor is separate from the act and no thoughts interfere with action because the unconscious act is the most free and uninhibited. When mushin functions, the mind moves from one activity to another, flowing like a stream of water and filling every space.
• p87 "How is it that each time I say I will work harder, you tell me that it will take longer?" the boy asked. "The answer is clear. When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the Way."
• p91 In order to achieve victory you must place yourself in your opponent's skin. If you don't understand yourself, you will lose one hundred percent of the time. If you understand your self, you will win fifty percent of the time. If you understand yourself and your opponent, you will win one hundred percent of the time. --Tsutomu Oshima
• p94 "Regulate your breathing, fix your eyes and mind on something else - perhaps a rock or a spot on the floor or ceiling. Concentrate on that object, savor it, taste it, give it color and smell the dimension. Let it absorb all your thoughts and concentration and the pain will diminish.
• p97 "Relax," he said. "Stop straining. The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be."
• p98 It is the caring or desire which stands in the way of effortless effort.
• p101 The mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It expects nothing. It reflects but does not hold. Therefore, the perfect man can act without effort.
• p105 Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose. But I am no longer afraid because they are familiar to me. In the heat of combat I am calm, which is as it should be because I have discovered that fear is shadow, no substance.
• p107 One of the first lessons one learns in the dojo is that the mind is a powerful factor in everything you do, including those exercises that seem to require a maximum of physical strength.
• p108 The mind is like a fertile garden, it will grow anything you wish to plant - beautiful flowers or weeds. And so it is with successful, healthy thoughts or with negative ones that will, like weeds, strangle and crowd the others. Do not allow negative thoughts to enter your mind for they are the weeds that strangle confidence. ... When such a thought enters my mind, I visualize it as being written on a piece of paper. Then I visualize myself wadding the paper up into a tight ball. Then I mentally light it on fire and visualize it burning to a crisp. The negative thought is destroyed, never to enter my mind again.
• p117 Zen koans - questions that cannot be resolved by rational thought
• p119 How does one achieve "a mind like still water?" One learns to go with the flow of life, the current of existence. When an untoward event occurs in your life, react to it without haste or passion. Realize that in almost every instance you probably have more alternatives than you think you have. Hold still a moment before acting or reacting and consider the alternatives. Then, having decided upon a course of action, proceed calmly.
• p122 I believe one can learn much about Zen from any activity one is engaged in by remaining aware of one's inner reactions. The key is a constant exercise of awareness, vigilance of the mind, and relaxation of the body. Applying the principles of Zen frees an individual from concern, tension, and anxiety about winning or losing.
• p122 My attitude toward my work has also changed. Years ago I thought too much about what I ahd to do, labored too long over it, put off difficult chores, waited for the mood to be right of the creative juices to flow. Now I just do it without conscious effort. If flows because the work and I are one, and not in conflict with each other.
• p129 Today I am a wiser man than I was yesterday. I'm a human being and a human being is a vulnerable creature, who cannot possibly be perfect. After he dies, he returns to the elements - to the earth, to water, to fire, to wind, to air. Matter is void. All is vanity. We are like blades of grass or trees of the forest, creations of the universe, of the siprit of the universe, and the spirit of the universe has neither life not death. Vanity is the only obstacle to life.
• p132 The only reason men fight is because they are insecure; one man needs to prove that he is better or stronger than another. The man who is secure within himself has no need to prove anything with force, so he can walk away from a fight with dignity and pride. He is the true martial artist - a man so strong inside that he has no need to demonstrate his power.
• p133 The Chinese word for this kind of confidence is sai, which can also be defined as "presence." It is a byproduct of self-confidence and is instantly recognizable in any situation. Martial artists who are certain of their ability have it when confronted with certain situations, just as any person who is expert in his field projects it.
• p134 One day it was announced by Master Joshu that the young monk Kyogen had reached an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers went to speak to him. "We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?" his fellow students inquired. "It is," Kyogen answered. "Tell us," said a friend, "how do you feel?" "As miserable as ever," replied the enlightened Kyogen.
• p134 To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill. --Sun Tzu