A Quote by Neal Stephenson

Just as an informal, nonscientific observation, most people's personalities don't seem to change very much during their lives. There are exceptions in the case of people who go through hugely traumatic events or suffer from brain injury or disease. Some would argue that religious conversions can have deep personality-altering effects. But these are all exceptions to the rule.

Neal Stephenson

Quote Topics

Argue Brain Brain Injury Case Change Deep Disease Effects Events Exceptions Go Hugely Informal Injury Just Lives Most Much Observation People Personalities Personality Religious Rule Seem Some Suffer Through Traumatic Traumatic Events Very Would

Quote Author

Neal Stephenson
American - Writer
Born: October 31, 1959

It's not just professional athletes and soldiers who are at risk from traumatic brain injury. More than 1.7 million people a year sustain a traumatic brain injury, and about 50,000 of them die each year, according the Centers for Disease Control. There are both emotional and financial costs from these injuries.

Anne Wojcicki

Do you like people? Most people claim that they like people with, of course, a "few exceptions." When the exceptions are added together it becomes clear that they include a vast majority of the people. It becomes equally clear that most people like just a few people, their kind of people, and either do not actively care for or actively dislike most of the "other" people.

Saul Alinsky

A long iron rod rocketed straight through the very forefront of Phineas Gage's brain. It's kind of an unusual part of the brain: you can suffer pretty severe injuries to it and often walk away from the injury. It's not a part of the brain that's necessarily vital for your biological self. But it is very important for personality.

Sam Kean

I think we've reached that point where we understand medically what we are doing to ourselves with these sports. In football, it's kind of hard to get the access that you want for the story and, of course, it's very long-term: the effects of the repeat concussions really don't hit until decades afterwards, whereas the traumatic injuries in extreme sports are very immediate. I realized Traumatic Brain Injury was a fascinating and important story that not had been told very much. I wanted to know more.

Lucy Walker

We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.

Wendell Berry

Most people who do a lot of exercise, particularly in the form of competitive athletics, have unneurotic, extraverted, optimistic personalities to begin with. (Marathon runners are exceptions to this.)

Robert M. Sapolsky

In my experience, with very few exceptions - I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions - the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed.

Michael Korda

I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

Iain Banks

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

Fernando Pessoa

One of the things in my experience about changing parties: There are very few exceptions to the general rule. And the general rule has been, people are going to invite you into the church, but they are not going to make you a deacon.

Pete Gallego

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

Al Gore

All we can do now is try to prevent secondary damage by relieving pressure on the brain caused by the initial injury. There is no reparative treatment for traumatic brain injury.

Charlie Cox

Most of my friends are into strange things I don't really understand - and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn't change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?

Hunter S. Thompson

It is a curious truth - and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation - that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness - not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.

Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

We're offered bigger, larger budget movies to produce a lot, and we don't do them. That's not to say there aren't exceptions: there are a few exceptions, but I try and stick by the rules that produce what I think is the highest quality, most innovative work and try and let the rules go that make us feel like we're retreading.