Wiring Quotes

[I]t makes little difference where we draw the line between the pruning and shaping [of behavior] by natural selection which is genetically transmitted to offspring (the wiring you are born with), and the pruning and shaping that later takes place in the individual (the rewiring you end up with, as a result of experience or training). Nature and nurture blend seamlessly together. (Daniel Dennett)

The most effective leaders of companies in transition are the quiet, unassuming people whose inner wiring is such that the worst circumstances bring out their best. They're unflappable, they're ready to die if they have to. But you can trust that, when bad things are happening, they will become clearheaded and focused.

James C. Collins

Disarmament is illogical and futile, unless one is prepared to regard the available means of production and social organization as affording unique social ends. To divert electrical energy and circuitry into atomic bombs shows the same imaginative power as wiring the dining-room chairs to enable one to electrocute the sitter in the event that he might prove hostile. It is part of the age-old habit of using new means for old purposes instead of discovering what are the new goals contained in the new means.

Marshall McLuhan

There are people who say "I'll never need this math, these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade," or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever again use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I can install toilets. I know all about the wax ring. I can tile floors. I'm learning how to do basic wiring.

Sandra Bullock

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?

Stewart Brand

The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn't mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps.

Alastair Reynolds

Anyone can be crazy. That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?

Michael Thomas Ford

Every brain is wired differently from every other brain, and learns in ways unique to that wiring.

John Medina

I'm so envious of that genetic wiring that immediately puts a smile on your face. My genetic wiring just puts creases in my eyebrows.

Chris Pine

[M]ath prodigies are set somewhat apart from the more general-capacity prodigies, being seemingly possessed of a weird bit of wiring more than an over-all enhanced capacity for learning to do things. (Adam Gopnik)

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

We think we control our environment, but in fact, it's our environment that controls us. We can't change the world. The only thing we can change is ourselves, by trying to get a better understanding of our own messed-up wiring.

Guy Spier

I consider myself a D.I.Y. home improvement guy. In a prior life, I completely gutted a house - redid the plumbing, wiring, moved sewage pipes, knocked down walls, everything.

Gary Locke

To add an AC outlet, for example, you just drill a circular hole in the wall, tap into the wiring, add the outlet and you're set. If you don't want it, pull it out and plaster over it with more earth to seal the hole.

Randy Bachman

The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it!

Daniel Abraham

not interested in space conquest or wiring, but using the form as a wonderful box of fixed metaphors you can play with endlessly, like a musician with a sonata.

Ursula K. Le Guin

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves.

Steven Pinker

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought.

Steven Pinker

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Growing up there are always those kids who are only happy when they are making someone else upset. That is unfortunately just how some people are. Some people are just born with bad wiring. (Patton Oswalt)

"But sociopaths don't see other people as people. Something's wrong with their wiring,” Nicole said. "They don't have any empathy, and they don't feel fear. So they don't feel guilty when they kill. If anything, they feel powerful.

Lis Wiehl

Byrne's Law: In any electrical circuit, appliances and wiring will burn out to protect fuses.

Robert Byrne

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

Kurt Vonnegut