Quotes About Brains

From study of known normal brains we have learned that there is a certain range of variation. No two brains are exactly alike, and the greatest source of error in the assertions of Benedict and Lombroso has been the finding of this or that variation in a criminal's brains, and maintaining such to be characteristic of the 'criminal constitution,' unmindful of the fact that like variations of structure may and do exist in the brains of normal, moral persons.

The captains of industry are not hunting money. America is heavy with it. They are seeking brains - specialized brains - and faithful, loyal service. Brains are needed to carry out the plans of those who furnish the capital.

My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a nation, our brains are running out the other end of our power right now.

Each of us plays four roles in relation to the brain. We lead, we inspire, we invent, and we use it. Most people do not actively use their brains. They passively let their feelings and thoughts control their lives. They don't invent new ways to use their brains, either, settling instead for the same routine and repetitive thoughts every day. But if you master all four roles, you create your super brain. When you are the active observer of your feelings and thoughts, you become the user of your brain. Your super brain then serves you, not vice versa.

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.

Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.

[Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves - Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets - and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.

All you've got to do is turn up and have a few facial tics and be a lunatic and throw someone around the room or blow their brains out and people think it's good acting.

Silence is the best substitute for brains ever invented.

We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I'm not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam's homework, bit if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.

It's the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus's brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.

They hadn’t counted on the highly controlled jabberjay having the brains to adapt to the wild, to pass on its genetic code, to thrive in a new form. They hadn’t anticipated its will to live.

One must apply one's reason to everything here, learning to obey, to shut up, to help, to be good, to give in, and I don't know what else. I'm afraid I shall use up all my brains too quickly, and I haven't got so very many. Then I shall not have any left for when the war is over.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

The Internet is just one of those things that contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at, that the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to. Our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure--but so, too, by reading, by television, by video games, by modern electronics, by contemporary music, by contemporary "tools," etc.

Say and do something positive that will help the situation; it doesn't take any brains to complain.

Bring me men to match my mountains: Bring me men to match my plains: Men with empires in their purpose and new eras in their brains.

Our riches, being in our brains, die with us... Unless of course someone chops off our head, in which case, we won't need them anyway.

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives. ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened.

I think: the powers like to talk about "freedom" in order to wash the population's brains.

There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.

Nobody rises above mediocrity unless they use the brains of other people.

I wouldn't have raced a horse. But you'll then throw back at me that Jesse Owens raced against a horse and he's one of my heroes so I'm not going to say it was a silly stunt. I know too much about horses. They're highly unreliable and they've got brains the size of golf balls.

what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination

The truth is that brains have little to do with either the making or accumulating of money.

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood

Whenever Muslim women protest and ask for their rights, they are silenced with the argument that the laws are justified under Islam. It is an unfounded argument. It is not Islam at fault, but rather the patriarchal culture that uses its own interpretations to justify whatever it wants. It utilizes psychology to say that women are emotional. It utilizes medical science to say that men's brains are formed in such a way that they are better able to understand concepts. These are all hypotheses. None of this has been proven.

I think of this a lot in the terms of books. Of course there's a big to-do culturally about e-books versus print books, sales models. The paradigm has changed but my perspective on it is that there's not going to be another paradigm to alight on because everything will continue to evolve so quickly that our brains won't be able to keep up with it.

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. … Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

If I should come out of this war alive, I will have more luck than brains.

God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours - so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things....In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strenght or our brains but simply because He has made us.

Laughing brains are more absorbent.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

No, indeed; I don't know anything. You see, I am stuffed, so I have no brains at all.

You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half-decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime.

Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all.

Where there are more guns, there are more gun problems, it 's particularly dangerous to have a gun around when people do things spontaneously. In college, from a public health standpoint, brains are n't fully developed.

I love jell-o. I love the way it comes in rainbow colours, wiggles and jiggles and looks like brains.

Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

Brains distinguish between an Us and a Them in a fraction of a second. Subliminal processing of a Them activates the amygdala and insular cortex, brain regions that are all about fear, anxiety, aggression, and disgust.

Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.

Blow your brains out and do it right, make sure it's on prime time and on Saturday night.

I guess politicians can be excused for thinking the electorate is stupid because they keep winning reelection. If you were Barbara Boxer or Harry Reid and you kept being reelected, you'd have to think, 'Half of my state is stupid.' But then you wouldn't be smart enough to think that if you had their brains.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

The effect of the advertising way of thinking on our brains, and how we live on our planet, is very disturbing. It's not a very good thing, and it's not the kind of thing to just make into kind of a "ha-ha."

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.