Jeffrey Kluger quotes

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form. (Jeffrey Kluger)
Indeed, the best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort of psychic muscle, one that can atrophy or grow stronger depending on how it's used. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
The mind and the body are inextricably entwined, and rarely are their inseparability clearer than when we're under some kind of mental pressure. The moment we start trying to learn a new skill, make a decision or otherwise think on our feet, our nervous system reacts - with accelerated pulse rate, increased respiration, even sweating. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
Certainly, people can get along without siblings. Single children do, and there are people who have irreparably estranged relationships with their siblings who live full and satisfying lives, but to have siblings and not make the most of that resource is squandering one of the greatest interpersonal resources you'll ever have. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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)
A mere ape in our world may be a scholar in its own, and the low life of any beast may be a source of deep satisfaction for the beast itself. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
Well, I think of the folks who are the climate deniers as the flat Earthers and the people who say the moon landings never happened. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist? View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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)
In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
There are popular celebrities, there are unpopular celebrities and then there are the walking dead. You know the walking dead when you see them: they look like Mel Gibson, still striving for drunken charm in an L.A. County mug shot, after getting picked up on a DWI charge that included anti-semitic slurs directed at the police. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger
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. View quote
Jeffrey Kluger