Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

Because sometimes not liking someone is easier.

It is because of men that women dislike one another.

A psychologist once asked a group of college students to jot down, in thirty seconds, the initials of the people they disliked. Some of the students taking the test could think of only one person. Others listed as many as fourteen. The interesting fact that came out of this bit of research was this: Those who disliked the largest number were themselves the most widely disliked. When we find ourselves continually disliking others, we ought to bring ourselves up short and ask ourselves the question: "What is wrong with me."

She glared at him. "Why are you forever asking hard questions?" He smiled. "Sooner or later you'll have to be able to answer one." Daja shoved him, grinning.

I don't know how women stop being friends with other women.

Academics are not necessarily nice people.

Another friend began to say, "Well, Quentin has a problem of adjusting himself to society and he..." This sentence was never finished. The ballet teacher expostulated, "I don't agree. Quentin does exactly as he pleases. The rest of us have to adapt ourselves to him."

The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.

We don't live in a shared reality, we each live in a reality of our own, and causing upset is often the price of trying to reach each other. It's always easier to dismiss other people than to go through the awkward and time consuming process of understanding them. We have given 'taking offense' a social status it doesn't deserve: it's not much more than a way of avoiding difficult conversations.

You don't learn how to say 'hey, I have a problem,' but you also don't learn how to hear it. There's a total breakdown of how females talk to one another. It's very disconcerting for leadership because it means you don't talk to each other; you talk about each other.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

When a man is familiar with many people he must expect many disagreeable familiarizations.

I've had that experience of not liking people very much, but having tremendous respect for them.

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.

Why do I get the feeling that if you give me a hard time, I'll tell all of our year-mates your family nickname is Meathead?

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Two is company; three is fifty bucks.

Whoa, Dimitri," I said, tossing my bag on the floor. "I realize this is actually a current hit in Eastern Europe right now, but do you think we could maybe listen to something that wasn't recorded before I was born?” Only his eyes flicked toward me; the rest of his posture remained the same. "What does it matter to you? I'm the one who's going to be listening to it. You'll be outside running.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

Women just get really hard on each other.

I'm sure men have their own ways of trying to demean one another, but women can be very gossipy and judgmental, and that doesn't help.

Edden called the church first,” she said by way of greeting, her thin eyebrows high as she spotted Ford’s arm linked in mine. “Hi, Ford.” The man reddened at the lilt she’d put in her last words, but I wouldn’t let him take his arm back. I liked being needed. “He’s having trouble with the background emotion,” I said. “And he’d rather be abused by yours?” Nice. (Ivy, Rachel and Ford)

Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.