Jeffrey Kluger famous quotes

The best you can sometimes do is learn to take a breath, count to ten and simply accept that try as you might, no, your husband will never, ever learn not to drop a wet towel on the bed. That acceptance too counts as resolving a fight.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Husband #Fighting #Acceptance

It's a deep and all but certain truth about narcissistic personalities that to meet them is to love them, but to know them well is to find them unbearable. Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Smart #Personality #Arrogance

Overspending is as certain a part of the holiday season as overeating. But pushing away from both the table and the cash register at least a little bit sooner can make the post-holiday hangover hurt a little bit less.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Hurt #Hangover #Holiday

Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Fall #Clueless #Axes

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Football #Jobs #Skulls

Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Book #Party #Home

There's a deep-freeze of sorts for all good intentions - a place that you store your plans to make changes in your life when you know you're not going to make them at all.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Good Intentions #Making Changes #Stores

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Sibling #Kids #People

There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Long #Victory #Disease

There's only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent - and that's being an adolescent. The moodiness, the volatility, the wholesale lack of impulse control, all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence, they're just part of the behavioral portfolio.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Home #Portfolios #Would Be

Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Immature #Environmental #Mercury

Part-black generally means all-black in Americans' minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups' camps.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Mean #Mind #Black

Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Errors #Identity #Special

I was born in the U.S., my wife was born in Mexico and emigrated here when she was in college, and my daughters were born in New York City. That makes them passport-carrying, natural-born, eligible-to-run-for-president Americans. But they're also Mexicans and they like that just fine.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Mother #Running #Daughter

At the root of the shy temperament is a deep fear of social judgment, one so severe it can sometimes be crippling. Introverted people don't worry unduly about whether they'll be found wanting, they just find too much socializing exhausting and would prefer either to be alone or in the company of a select few people.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Roots #Worry #People

Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#School #Athlete #Opposites

Becoming food savvy is one thing, but it's amazing how fast savvy turns to snooty, and snooty leaves you preparing three-hour meals that break your budget and that the kids won't even eat.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Kids #Becoming #Meals

Credit or debit cards, for starters, are nothing short of shoppers' Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money, we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Hurt #Dirty #Age

Everybody loves to spend money at least some of the time - because everybody loves the stuff you can buy with it. The key to the pleasure level of any transaction is the balance between the pain of the payment and the reward of the purchased object.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Pain #Keys #Balance

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Sound #Different #Language

Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Abuse #Pet #Cages

I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#School #Yearbook #Church

Suffering is always hard to quantify - especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as Alzheimer's. Most illnesses attack the body; Alzheimer's destroys the mind - and in the process, annihilates the very self.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Pain #Self

Older siblings get more total-immersion mentoring with their parents before younger siblings come along. As a result, they get an IQ and linguistic advantage because they are the exclusive focus of their parents' attention.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Sibling #Parent #Focus

When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules, but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls, and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you've got an adolescent boy, you're in the sweet spot for trouble.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Girl #Sweet #Kids

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Simple #Vaccines #Parent

There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Song #Passion #Sorrow

Ambition is an expensive impulse, one that requires an enormous investment of emotional capital. Like any investment, it can pay off in countless different kinds of coin.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Ambition #Emotional #Different

Even the best computer in the world has no idea that it exists. You do. No one knows what creates that ineffable awareness that we're here...
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Ideas #World #Computer

Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others need something to get their pilot light lit?
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Fire #Light #People

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Real #Pride #Worry

The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Giving #Feelings #Looks

From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales,
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Brother #Role Models #Roles

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Brain #Downtime

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Simple #Facts #Murder

When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Past #Culture #Saving

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Memories #Night #Ideas

When you're your parents' one shot at a genetic legacy, you may get to attend all the best schools, wear all the best clothes and eat all the best foods - at least relative to children in multiple-sibling households. But you also wind up with an overweening sense of your own importance.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Children #Sibling #School

When you learn conflict-resolution skills in the playroom, you then practice them on the playground, and that in turn stays with you. If you have a combative sibling or a physically intimidating, older sibling, you learn a lot about how to deal with situations like that later in life. If you're an older sibling and you have a younger sibling who needs mentoring or is afraid of the dark, you develop nurturing and empathic skills that you wouldn't otherwise have.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Sibling #Dark #Practice

Sadoway does more than entertain; he gives you a glimpse into the future of energy.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Giving #Energy #Glimpse

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Smart #Arrogance #Smugness

Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley's is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Photography #Moments #Lifetime

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Simple #Yeast #Reason

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Dog #Cat #Animal

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.
-- Jeffrey Kluger

#Sports #Suicide #Football