Unreliable Quotes - Page 3

• When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Memories, Night, Ideas

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• I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.

  William Gibson

  Real, Thinking, Internet

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• What an unreliable thing is time--when I want it to fly, the hours stick to me like glue. And what a changeable thing, too. Time is the twine to tie our lives into parcels of years and months. Or a rubber band stretched to suit our fancy. Time can be the pretty ribbon in a little girl's hair. Or the lines in your face, stealing your youthful colour and your hair. .... But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.

  Rohinton Mistry

  Girl, Ties, Hair

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• Evolution is unobservable. It's based on blind faith in a few dry bones and on unreliable dating systems in which the gullible trust. Kids should be allowed to make up their own minds about this issue, and not be censored to 'one side is all we will let you hear.'

  Ray Comfort

  Kids, Dry Bones, Issues

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• ...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.

  John Piper

  Dark, Despair, Pessimism

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• Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -but no opinion.

  Hannah Arendt

  Opportunity, Fickle, May

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• Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fall, Men, Work Out

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.180, Simon and Schuster

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• People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.

  Leonora Carrington

  Cat, People, Seven

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• Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.

  Holly Black

  Memories, Giving, People

  Holly Black (2010). “White Cat”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

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• Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.

  Mark Twain

  Men, Museums, Machines

  Mark Twain (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.87, Univ of California Press

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• A snob is unreliable. The work he praises might just be good.

  Karl Kraus

  Might, Praise, Snob

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• Parents must begin to discover their children as individuals of developing tastes and views and so help them be, and see, themselves as thinking, feeling people. It is far too easy for a middle-years child to absorb an over-simplified picture of himself as a sloppy, unreliable, careless, irresponsible, lazy creature and not much more--an attitude toward himself he will carry far beyond these years.

  Dorothy H Cohen

  Attitude, Children, Thinking

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• How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.

  Karl Kraus

  Faithful, Today, Tomorrow

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• The idea that affable Boris[Johnson] is actually divisive, selfish and unreliable is Mr 's biggest weakness.

  James Kirkup

  Selfish, Ideas, Weakness

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• Human beings are infinitely fallible, completely unreliable. Science is not. Science is absolute. Under strict principles, if you do A and B, then C will occur. This rarely happens if you inject the inefficiences of humanity into the process.

  David Baldacci

  Humanity, Principles, Process

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• Just because Rachel [from the Girl On The Train] is an unreliable character doesn't mean she has sex with anybody who walks by her. It was important to keep her a little virginal.

  Erin Cressida Wilson

  Girl, Sex, Character

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• The market, if it can be kept honest and competitive, does provide very strong incentives for work effort and productive contributions. In their absence, society would thrash about for alternative incentives-some unreliable, like altruism; some perilous like collective loyalty; some intolerable, like coercion or oppression.

  Arthur Melvin Okun

  Loyalty, Wisdom, Strong

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• You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

  H. G. Wells

  Artist, Wish, Bombs

  H. G. Wells (2013). “Delphi Collected Works of H. G. Wells (Illustrated)”, p.8287, Delphi Classics

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• There's nothing so unreliable as figures, and everybody but a mathematician knows that. Figures lie right to your face.

  Marjorie Benton Cooke

  Lying, Data, Faces

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• The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.

  Paul Bloom

  Gay, People, Abortion

  "To urgh is human" by Paul Bloom, www.theguardian.com. July 21, 2004.

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• Faith is the problem. Faith is unreliable way to think about problems that will not lead to the truth.

  Peter Boghossian

  Thinking, Religion, Way

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• To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior.

  Jakob Nielsen

  Self, Design, Pay

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• Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the average human being is in all that concerns sexual life?

  Sigmund Freud

  Average, Concern, Humans

  Sigmund freud (1975). “Gen Intro Psycho”, Pocket

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• I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

  Norman Lock

  Ideas, Narrators, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life. Jesus listened. In John's Gospel we are told that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions (11:33)... The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn of reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action.

  Brennan Manning

  Jesus, Children, Father

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