“We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."”

“It is naive to believe that the admiration for a masterpiece is spontaneous. The admiration, to a great extent, is not born within people but between people, as if we forced each other to admire (while no one is “personally” enraptured).”

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”

“We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.”

““We have a problem, sir.”
“What do you mean, a problem?” demanded the Admiral. “We’re not supposed to have problems—that’s the enemy’s job!””

“Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough.”

““The dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and breeds them. And so then we watch that for six million years. We start to understand what it means to be the hero. We start to tell stories about that, and so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchies - the selection mechanism mediated by female choice - but our stories are trying to push us in that direction. And so then we say, 'Well, look, that person is admirable.' We tell a story about him. And then we say, 'This person is admirable,' and we tell a story about him. And at the same time we talk about the people who aren't admirable. And then we start having admirable and non-admirable as categories. And out of that you get something like good and evil. And then you can start to imagine the perfect person. You take ten admirable people and you pull out someone who is meta-admirable. And that's a hero. That becomes a religious figure across time. That becomes a savior or a messiah across time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is. In the West here's how we figured it out: we said that the ideal man is the person that tells the truth. And what that means is that it's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy in the way that's most stable and most lasting. That's the conclusion of Western culture."”

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”

“For no fact is so simple we believe it at first sight,
And there is nothing that exists so great or marvellous
That over time mankind does not admire it less and less.”
Sed neque tam facilis res ulla est, quin ea primum difficilis magis ad credendum constet, itemque nil adeo magnum neque tam mirabile quicquam, quod non paulatim minuant mirarier omnes.

“We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.”