Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know Quotes
"I am up today just praising God, thanking His name. Definitely thanking Him not just because it’s my birthday, but thanking Him for growth, thanking Him for the different things that He has done in my life over this past year."
"Good morning, my beautiful Kings and Queens.… I am not a racist. I grew up in Villa Park, Illinois. I was the only black girl on an all-white cheerleading squad.… Black people, you will not be successful in this world until you learn how to work with white people."
"I want the white folks to really understand out there that black people are doing as much as we can…and we can’t help but get pissed off when we see situations where it’s clear that the black life didn’t matter."
"For a time, this was what Americans talked about."
"We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things."
"In the sixteenth century, there were close to seventy wars involving the nations and states of Europe."
"You fought the person directly across the border, who had always been directly across your border."
"The modern world is not two brothers feuding for control of the Ottoman Empire. It is Cortés and Montezuma struggling to understand each other through multiple layers of translators."
"In short I had established a certain confidence which was my aim, and on my side in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."
"Now I recommend you go home, and sleep quietly in your beds."
"We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy."
"If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy."
"The words PAIN, ATTACK, and THREAT seem similar, but I don’t know that they say anything about me."
"We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away."
"We need a trigger to snap out of the default to truth, but the threshold for triggers is high."
"The simple truth, Levine argues, is that lie detection does not—cannot—work the way we expect it to work."
"You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them."
"Her handlers, with her unwitting assistance, assessed her vulnerabilities and exploited her psychological needs, ideology, and personal pathology to recruit her and keep her motivated to work for Havana."
"The game was fucking over, and I mean it was over in a heartbeat."
"I enjoy young people. I—I love to be around them."
"I worked very hard to try to connect with them."
"I saw what people are capable of doing, because when you run a business, five to six percent of your revenues are going to be lost to theft."
"People have too much faith in large organizations."
"They trust the accounting firms, which you should never trust because they’re incompetent."
"I came to the conclusion that we didn’t understand what he was doing."
"The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison."
"National media and public opinion has totally in every single way ruined me."
"I feel my words were slightly twisted and not totally portrayed accurately."