
Top 100 Leonard Mlodinow Quotes
#1. Politicians often misuse science for political ends and to pursue their own agenda.
Leonard Mlodinow
#2. Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume, and a minimum of noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances the impression of intelligence.
Leonard Mlodinow
#3. One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood - and one thing that affects your mood is the weather.
Leonard Mlodinow
#4. We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in the society who come out on the bottom.
Leonard Mlodinow
#5. Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don't just taste its chemical composition; you also taste its price.
Leonard Mlodinow
#6. Unfortunately, in 1861, when he was forty, Buckle caught typhus while traveling in Damascus. Offered the services of a local physician, he refused because the man was French, and so he died.
Leonard Mlodinow
#8. We unwittingly judge products by their boxes, books by their covers, and even corporation's annual reports by their nice glossy finish.
Leonard Mlodinow
#9. I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays.
Leonard Mlodinow
#10. I always liked movies, so I started writing for Hollywood, but my day job was physics.
Leonard Mlodinow
#11. Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
Leonard Mlodinow
#12. Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
Leonard Mlodinow
#13. Newton was not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.
Leonard Mlodinow
#14. In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive.
Leonard Mlodinow
#15. That's why doctors instinctively "package" themselves in nice shirts and ties and it's not advisable for attorneys to greet clients in Budweiser T-shirts. In
Leonard Mlodinow
#16. Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.
Leonard Mlodinow
#17. I believe in a kind of God. I think all scientists, in a way, believe in a certain God, in a certain order of nature.
Leonard Mlodinow
#18. People spend a lot of time talking and thinking about how members of the opposite sex look, but very little time paying attention to how they sound. To our unconscious minds, however, voice is very important.
Leonard Mlodinow
#19. Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.
Leonard Mlodinow
#20. Touch is our most highly developed sense when we are born, and it remains a fundamental mode of communication throughout a baby's first year and an important influence throughout a person's life.
Leonard Mlodinow
#21. We believe that when we choose anything, judge a stranger and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false.
Leonard Mlodinow
#22. Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain.
Leonard Mlodinow
#23. One of the most surprising forms of nonverbal communication is the way we automatically adjust the amount of time we spend looking into another's eyes as a function of our relative social position.
Leonard Mlodinow
#24. A pygmy upon a gyants shoulder may see farther than the [giant] himself.
Leonard Mlodinow
#25. Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer.
Leonard Mlodinow
#26. I think the fun of following the movie box office and stocks is very similar to the fun of sports - all three combine passion and unpredictability.
Leonard Mlodinow
#27. If a lecture was not interesting or proceeded too slowly or too quickly, they would jeer and become rowdy.
Leonard Mlodinow
#28. When judging a product, we rarely have exhaustive scientific data to go by. As a result, if we are to form a complete picture, we must fill in the blanks, just as we must in our visual perception.
Leonard Mlodinow
#29. I find that predicting the course of our lives is like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict your future in the short term, but the longer you look ahead, the less likely you are to be correct.
Leonard Mlodinow
#30. The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared. - RUTH BENEDICT
Leonard Mlodinow
#31. Upon learning of the young man's interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.
Leonard Mlodinow
#32. I believe there is true expertise in some endeavors, and not in others. There is obviously no such thing as expertise in predicting the results of coin tosses, but there is expertise in predicting the behavior of lasers.
Leonard Mlodinow
#33. On the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.
Leonard Mlodinow
#34. We perceive, we remember our experiences, we make judgments, we act - and in all of these endeavors, we are influenced by factors that we aren't aware of.
Leonard Mlodinow
#35. Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and - as I keep reminding my teenage children - pointing and grunting get you only so far.
Leonard Mlodinow
#36. The truth is that our unconscious minds are active, purposeful, and independent. Hidden they may be, but their effects are anything but, for they play a critical role in shaping the way our conscious minds experience and respond to the world.
Leonard Mlodinow
#37. Every aspect of our lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us.
Leonard Mlodinow
#39. In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.
Leonard Mlodinow
#40. That's why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set - the set of people who don't give up.
Leonard Mlodinow
#41. Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals.
Leonard Mlodinow
#42. Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.
Leonard Mlodinow
#43. We all know that looks matter, and modern politicians have always assumed that their battles are decided on both substance and image.
Leonard Mlodinow
#44. Whatever I've worked on, I've always tried to make my writing personal. I think that's what makes my books somewhat different from what other scientists are doing. You have to tie concepts into everyday life, or they just won't be interesting for readers.
Leonard Mlodinow
#45. We routinely participate in elaborate nonverbal exchanges even when we are not consciously aware of doing so.
Leonard Mlodinow
#47. Random events often look like nonrandom events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.
Leonard Mlodinow
#48. One of the things your unconscious mind does for you - and it's a great gift - is it gives you extra courage to view the outer world and it does that by giving you an extra-special view of yourself.
Leonard Mlodinow
#49. Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.
Leonard Mlodinow
#50. The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the "new unconscious," to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurologist-turned-clinician named Sigmund Freud.
Leonard Mlodinow
#51. A failure doesn't mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try.
Leonard Mlodinow
#52. if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.
Leonard Mlodinow
#53. People seemed to "decide" how much to eat based on box size as much as taste.
Leonard Mlodinow
#54. Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn't associate with weirdos.
Leonard Mlodinow
#55. We have emotions for a reason; for instance, imagine pain. You have pain so that if you touch something that's hot, or if you slam your hand with a hammer, you will pull your hand away and not do that again.
Leonard Mlodinow
#56. Social rejection doesn't just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being.
Leonard Mlodinow
#57. We all know that players will hit a few more home runs than usual in some years and a few less in others. But the mathematics of chance also predicts that some years they'll hit a lot more, and some years a lot less.
Leonard Mlodinow
#58. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.
Leonard Mlodinow
#59. The pitch, timbre, volume, speed, and cadence of your voice, the speed with which you speak, and even the way you modulate pitch and loudness, are all hugely influential factors in how convincing you are and how people judge your state of mind and character.
Leonard Mlodinow
#60. The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow.
Leonard Mlodinow
#61. Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.
Leonard Mlodinow
#62. 'Subliminal' is about how we misinterpret our behavior because we're unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.
Leonard Mlodinow
#63. My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.
Leonard Mlodinow
#64. Few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received,"15 Lerner concluded that "for the sake of their own sanity," people overestimate the degree to which ability can be inferred from success.
Leonard Mlodinow
#65. Whether it's fiction or nonfiction, writing takes me to another world.
Leonard Mlodinow
#66. One of the ways we interact with other human beings and form social bonds is through touch, and probably most of us are not aware of the extreme importance of touch.
Leonard Mlodinow
#67. People intuitively realize that there is strength in numbers and take comfort in the company of others, especially in times of anxiety or need.
Leonard Mlodinow
#68. We all understand that genius doesn't guarantee success, but it's seductive to assume that success must come from genius.
Leonard Mlodinow
#69. The first step in battling the illusion of control is to be aware of if. But even then it is difficult, once we think we see a pattern, we do not easily let go of our perception.
Leonard Mlodinow
#70. I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.
Leonard Mlodinow
#71. Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words and are communicated - and understood - without conscious thought.
Leonard Mlodinow
#72. Listeners instinctively detect that when we lower the usual pitch of our voice, we are sad, and when we raise it, we are angry or fearful.
Leonard Mlodinow
#73. I've always loved science, as far back as I can remember. I was very, very curious about how everything worked: the world, the physical universe, chemistry, law. So it was only natural to be curious about how our mind works.
Leonard Mlodinow
#74. The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth.
Leonard Mlodinow
#75. To the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player.
Leonard Mlodinow
#76. We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.
Leonard Mlodinow
#77. You're wasting your time," he said. "You don't learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.
Leonard Mlodinow
#79. French culture is known for many great attributes, some of which probably have nothing to do with food, wine, and romance.
Leonard Mlodinow
#80. In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.
Leonard Mlodinow
#81. The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.
Leonard Mlodinow
#82. Nonverbal communication forms a social language that is in many ways richer and more fundamental than our words.
Leonard Mlodinow
#84. We should keep in mind that it is easy to concoct stories explaining the past or to become confident about dubious scenarios of the future. We should view both explanations and prophecies with skepticism.
Leonard Mlodinow
#86. Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years," and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, "That's exactly what I mean about wasting your time.
Leonard Mlodinow
#87. We all know that looks matter. What most of us don't understand is just how much looks matter and how difficult it is for us to ignore a person's appearance when making a social judgment.
Leonard Mlodinow
#88. Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.
Leonard Mlodinow
#89. Research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.
Leonard Mlodinow
#90. I wouldn't have to drop out of academia and take a more lucrative position waiting tables at the faculty club.
Leonard Mlodinow
#91. Paleontological evidence suggests that the early farmers had more spinal issues, worse teeth, and more anemia and vitamin deficiencies - and died younger - than the populations of human foragers who preceded them.
Leonard Mlodinow
#92. They required three thousand Jews, the man said, and the line had apparently held 3,004.
Leonard Mlodinow
#93. Intentionality and talent always matter. An extraordinary feat is certainly made more likely by someone's focus, hard work, etc. But chance also matters.
Leonard Mlodinow
#94. Non-human primates spend hours a day grooming each other. And with humans, touching is also important. It's a way to form bonds and connect in modern society. But you can also speed up the use of conscious purposes once you're aware of that, and it can be manipulated.
Leonard Mlodinow
#95. You have to have passion for a subject to write about it. You can't expect your readers to feel any excitement if it's nothing but a boring writing exercise for you.
Leonard Mlodinow
#96. The invention of mummification. This was believed to be the key to a happy afterlife; certainly there were no disgruntled customers coming back to say otherwise.
Leonard Mlodinow
#97. Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15 I
Leonard Mlodinow
#98. The attacks on global warming are no different than the attacks the cigarettes companies used to use to say that cigarettes don't cause cancer.
Leonard Mlodinow
#99. we are highly invested in feeling different from one another - and superior - no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You
Leonard Mlodinow
#100. If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, "I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives," you'd probably get a pretty strange look;
Leonard Mlodinow
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