“I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.”
“My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.”
“We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration.”
“I'm interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there's not a lot known about that.”
“In 2001, I was being treated for breast cancer, and I was pretty sure I was going to recover.”
“My parents were atheists, strong atheists. I never got the answer 'God.'”
“The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce.”
“A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction.”
“I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.”
“I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.”