A Quote by Wendy Kaminer

If all issues are personalized, we lose our capacity to entertain ideas, to generalize from our own or someone else's experiences, to think abstractly. We substitute sentimentality for thought.

Wendy Kaminer

Quote Topics

Capacity Else Entertain Experiences Generalize Ideas Issues Lose Our Own Personalized Sentimentality Someone Substitute Think Thought

Quote Author

Wendy Kaminer
American - Lawyer
Born: December 28, 1949

I love things that are brave enough to be nakedly about what our lives are actually built of, when you're wild about someone, or you love something, or you're a fool, or you embarrass yourself. And I don't think the answer is cynicism. Cynicism is not the cure for sentimentality. Cynicism is its own form of sentimentality. For example, I tried to watch Breaking Bad. After three episodes, I thought, I don't like this guy. I don't care about him. But you can see why people tell themselves that they think this is real. But real doesn't mean bad.

Daniel Mendelsohn

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you're defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

Brene Brown

I'm a champion for personal differences. I have no sympathy for drug companies that can't figure out how to make personalized medicine. We could generalize that to 'All society should be much more personalized.'

George M. Church

The notion of "humanity" as a form of transcendence derives, I think, from the conviction that intellectuality possesses an absolute power, from the demand that our best behavior depends on our ability to think abstractly, in terms of a universal rule, about something called humanity, that we need to understand humanity abstractly so that we can act responsibly towards those who represent it.

Talal Asad

Tolling... has a place. We're not going to toll our way to prosperity as a country. It is a tool that can be used in some instances, for example, to add capacity and to pay for that capacity privately. But I don't think it is a complete solution to how we deal with our surface transportation issues.

Anthony Foxx

Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun.

Thomas Merton

Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition ? we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of lose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.

Gregory Bateson

By withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the U.S. cedes power and influence to our rivals. If we retreat on our promises and cede leadership on climate issues, we lose credibility. Further, we lose the ability to hold other countries accountable for a broader range of issues.

Christine Todd Whitman

Do we have hospital capacity issues? We do. But the reality is in our state and virtually ever other rural state across America, we have ICU bed issues and hospital capacity issues even when there's not COVID-19.

Tate Reeves

As comedians, if nothing else, we're certainly allowed to make fun of ourselves and our own journeys and our own experiences.

Lauren Ash

We don't want to give the controls to someone else; we want those reins ourselves. We want to get our way. And we get upset when things don't work out. . . . When we try to control someone else or events beyond the scope of our power, we lose. When we learn to discern the difference between what we can change and what we can't, we usually have an easier time expressing our power in our lives. Because we're not wasting all our energy using our power to change things we can't, we have a lot of energy left over to live our lives.

Melody Beattie

All of us need to begin to think in terms of our own inner strengths, our resilience and resourcefulness, our capacity to adapt and to rely upon ourselves and our families.

Steven Pressfield

From deep in the slave hut is somebody calling over 150 years to all of our experiences and all of our ideas on human respect, and all of our ideas on dignity. And I felt like that's just incredibly powerful.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it's pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.

J. D. Vance

No industry is immune and no occupation is safe. All of us need to begin to think in terms of our own inner strengths, our resilience and resourcefulness, our capacity to adapt and to rely upon ourselves and our families.

Steven Pressfield

When I work for someone else, I always make money for them. When I back my own ideas, I am bound to lose.