Tom Vanderbilt famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The way humans hunt for parking and the way animals hunt for food are not as different as you might think.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Thinking #Animal #Humanity
The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life-different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability-mingle so freely.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Race #Class #People
Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Men #Trying #May
As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Different #Arguing #Driving
Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Interesting #Attention #Psychological
Many traffic signs have become like placebos, giving false comfort to the afflicted, or simple boilerplate to ward off lawsuits, the roadway version of the Kelloggâ€™s Pop-Tarts box that says, â€œWarning: Pastry Filling May Be Hot When Heated.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Simple #Giving #Warning
Whether advanced driver training helps drivers in the long term is one of those controversial and unresolved mysteries of the road, but my eye-opening experience at Bondurant raises the curious idea that we buy carsâ€”for most people one of the most costly things they will ever ownâ€”with an underdeveloped sense of how to use them. This is true for many things, arguably, but not knowing what the F9 key does in Microsoft Word is less life-threatening than not knowing how to properly operate antilock brakes.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Eye #Keys #Ideas
The relative ease of most driving lures us into thinking we can get away with doing other things. Indeed, those other things, like listening to the radio, can help when driving itself is threatening to cause fatigue. But we buy into the myth of multitasking with little actual knowledge of how much we can really add in or, as with the television news, how much we are missing. As the inner life of the driver begins to come into focus, it is becoming clear not only that distraction is the single biggest problem on the road but that we have little concept of just how distracted we are.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Thinking #Focus #Missing
When a situation feels dangerous to you, it's probably more safe than you know; when a situation feels safe, that is precisely when you should feel on guard.
-- Tom Vanderbilt

#Safe #Should #Dangerous

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.
Fear is born of Satan, and if we would only take time to think a moment we would see that everything Satan says is founded upon a falsehood.
Therefore a person fully absorbed in the bodily concept of life is surely killing himself by not making spiritual progress. Such a person is called pasu-ghna. Especially excluded from spiritual life are the animal hunters, who are not interested in hearing and chanting the holy name of the Lord. Such hunters are always unhappy, both in this life and in the next. It is therefore said that a hunter should neither die nor live because for such persons both living and dying are troublesome.
I could not have slept tonight if I had left that helpless little creature to perish on the ground.
The propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.
Some, while deploring animal abuses, on the same breath approve 'benefits to humans from certain animal abuses'! Who would criticize the Jewish holocaust or Black slavery, and YET praise the benefits to Germans or Whites??? This convenient ambiguity at the expense of animals is unacceptable!!!
It's disheartening that animal people criticize societies that enlist the help of actors or organize creative acts like 'I'd rather go naked than wear fur,' to increase public awareness to our cause. These are great/courageous ideas which time has come! Liberation of animals is REVOLUTION - not elegant performance/ intellectual competition. We should do most anything to advance the animal rights cause. All the bickering may make the one step forward... TWO STEPS BACKWARD???
A movie is about human beings, about humanity.
By the very fact of public life, one seems to lose humanity in people's eyes.
In fact, the converse is true: At a time when the United States has been called on for a level of moral leadership, vision and inspiration not seen since World War II, we cannot afford to dissemble about crimes against humanity.

Tom Vanderbilt famous quotes

You may also like: