“We will achieve freatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years.”

“Oh you kissed the soul of a rebelIn a Yankee girlYou got to meI heard you callin' 'round the worldFrom your back roadsTennessee”

“I have lost too much sleep, but I'm gonna find it.”

“Every time I complete a major project I reward myself with two full days of just reading and coffee! I do justify that it is my work!”

“The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.”

“David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation.The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences.”

“A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work.”