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.

There's going to be biological differences between the genders. There's going to be biological differences between two women or two men. There's biological differences between all of us. My concern is, why are we so concerned about it? Why are we so worried about it? Why, whenever a study comes out about men do this one way and women do this one way, or men's brains and women's brains - why are we so interested in that? You know, what makes us so fascinated by differences between the sexes? And I think more often than not that interest is deeply embedded in sexism.

Presumably there are energies, to which each human is sensitive, that we cannot yet detect by means of our instruments. Built into our brains and our bodies are very sensitive tuneable receivers for energies that we do not yet know about in our science but that each one of us can detect under the proper circumstances and the proper state of mind. We can tune our nervous systems and bodies to receive these energies. We can also tune our brains and bodies to transmit these energies.

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains.

Recreation is nothing but a change of work-an occupation for the hands by those who live by their brains, or for the brains by those who live by their hands.

There is always this interesting relationship we have with technology. When we invented writing Socrates used to say it was going to rot our brains because we were going to write everything down and not have to remember anything, and so it would atrophy our brains. So there has always been this human drive on the one hand to create tools, to create technologies to overcome our boundaries, but then there is always this reservation, and this fear that say these technologies are somehow unnatural and it is against nature to partake in them.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don't know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.

And the reward when good people die - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.

For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

Brains and character rule the world. The most distinguished Frenchman of the last century said: Men succeed less by their talents than their character. There were scores of men a hundred years ago who had more intellect than Washington. He outlives and overrides them all by the influence of his character.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

When discussing complex systems like brains and other societies, it is easy to oversimplify: I call this Occam's lobotomy.

Words are not brains, you know.

I eat 'The Walking Dead' like its made of brains. Can't even watch the show, I love the book so much.

It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.

Writing for adults, you have to keep reminding them of what is going on. The poor things have given up using their brains when they read. Children you only need to tell things to once.

Unlike any other nation, here the people rule, and their will is the supreme law. It is sometimes sneeringly said by those who do not like free government, that here we count heads. True, heads are counted, but brains also . . .

Let positive, strong, helpful thoughts enter into your brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones.

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.

You don't want to be so open minded that your brains fall out!

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

We have to get the... the thing I got... to the Angel. And then he'll tell Door about her family, and he'll tell me how to get home." Lamia looked at Hunter with delight. "And he can give you brains," she said, cheerfully, "and me a heart.

I think the neural pathways in our brains affect what happens in our bodies, and so can alter our health.

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

We dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us.

When we walk, the two halves of our brains converse.

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

We are having wool pulled over our eyes if we let ourselves be convinced that scientists, taken as a group, are anything special in the way of brains. They are very ordinary professional men, and all they know is their own trade, just like all other professional men. There are some geniuses among them, just as there are mental giants in any other field of endeavor.

What a frightful weapon is human thought! It is our defense and our safeguard, the most precious gift that God has made us. It is ours and it obeys us; we may launch it forth into space, but, once outside of our feeble brains, it is gone; we can no longer control it.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.

Stress and anxiety cause our brains to release chemicals that put lines in our faces and tear us down emotionally and spiritually.

If you had half as much brains as you have beard, you would have looked before you leaped.

Work addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer?

Turns out, people's brains are not nearly as powerful a motivator as our hearts. Facts, data, and economic models don't move people to courageous action the way that powerful stories can.

Imagine something a million times more powerful than your smartphone that is the size of a brain cell interfacing with your biological neurons. That will be the complete symbiosis. That will be when we augment our brains at the level of the neuron.

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.

Just because I squeezed my gigantic bottom into men’s trousers, you needn’t assume my brains have shrunk to masculine size.

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.

Human beings only use ten percent of their brains. Ten percent! Can you imagine how much we could accomplish if we used the other sixty percent?

When you lose the title, that doesn't mean you lose the contract to what you had. Just like when you win the title, it doesn't mean you win brains, PhDs and MAs.

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.

I flashed her a smile, but she didn't even look at me. So for brains and good judgment, I'd give her a three.

I got more guts than brains, and that's my problem.

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

Compassion costs. It is easy enough to argue, criticize and condemn, but redemption is costly, and comfort draws from the deep. Brains can argue, but It takes heart to comfort.