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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Instead of asking yourself, 'How can they think that?!' ask yourself, 'I wonder what information they have that I don’t?' Instead of asking, 'How can they be so irrational?' ask, 'How might they see the world such that their view makes sense?'”
— Douglas Stone, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
Tagged: Curiosity, Empathy, In Praise of Moderation, Dealing With Difficult People, Be Moderate
“When you create an authentic brand that you believe in, you need to push yourself to think about what that brand really means, and that’s not limited to a product or industry. Go deeper. Think about its values, think about how it can be tweaked, reframed, and spun into something more interesting.”
— Marc Ecko, Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out
Tagged: Branding
“Your relevance is about as relevant as the Earth is to the billions and billions of stars in the sky.”
— Marc Ecko, Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out
Tagged: Relevance
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
— Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs
Tagged: Craftmanship
“After a ten-month courtship, I married Maggie, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the novelist Thomas McGuane and the actress Margot Kidder. I was thirty-four. I did things my way. Now, three years later, we had a baby coming and lived on a ranch that I’d purchased on a whim and had no notion of how to run...Two years later I was divorced. I worked too hard. We’d never been a match. Mercury was in retrograde. Things change. Compared to what else can happen in this world, and to what almost had the day after my birthday, the divorce felt like business, a sad adult procedure. I’d married a teenager, what did I expect? To be the exception, as usual. Guess not. The sentimental turns to the statistical. I hung on to the ranch for a time, which seemed important, but cash ran low and I sold it to a neighbor who happened to be a real estate agent. A few days later he resold the place to a wealthy buyer he’d had waiting, pocketing a nice margin.”
— Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Tagged: Marriage
“One reason the Internet fosters conspiracy theories is that its system of branching, crossing tunnels is shaped like paranoid reasoning itself, and once inside the shadow maze you find yourself tracking elusive glimmers of light that recede as fast as you can follow them.”
— Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Tagged: Conspiracy Theories, Mazes, WWW
“I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him. That’s what empathy does— it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.”
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Tagged: Empathy, Polytheism, Openness, Seeing Through The Eyes Of Other People, My Philosophy
“Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know the difference between truth and falsehood. What comes to matter then is positioning— the statement on an issue that will avoid controversy or generate needed publicity, the stance that will fit both the image his press folks have constructed for him and one of the narrative boxes the media has created for politics in general.”
— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Tagged: The Media, How Politicians Think, Mazes of Individual References Points, Contextualism, Rhetoric In Politics
“When I come home, flush with all this new semi-insider gossip, my wife, Laurie, startles me by saying that during the first couple of months of my sabbatical, when I was home all the time, there had been 'no energy in the house' and how grateful she is that I’m finally doing something 'purposeful' in public. One can forget this or disguise it or pretend it isn’t so, but really the sexiest thing a husband can do is go out and return with news of the world.”
— David Shields, Black Planet
Tagged: Gossip, News
“Is race on my brain, and am I screwed up? Or is it on everyone else’s brain, and am I just taking notes? No one ever acknowledges the true subject of our discussions; it can never get expressed directly, it simply can’t be, won’t be, isn’t allowed to be talked about openly, and so it comes out in a thousand indirect inflections.”
— David Shields, Black Planet
Tagged: Race, Repression