Quotes about nudge (39 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”

Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) American political economist

Elinor Ostrom (2009) "Nobel Prize Lecture", December 8.

Motivation , Past

“Nudge: You aren't.
Iggy (irritably): No. You aren't dead either. How about just 'hello'?”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Maximum Ride The Angel Experiment

Dead

“Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path. An accumulation of small acts can change the world.”

Robin Hobb book Fool's Fate

Source: Fool's Fate

World , Change

“If something doesn't work exactly right, or maybe needs some special treatment, you don't just throw it away. Everything can't be fully operational all the time. Sometimes, we need to have the patience to give something the little nudge it needs.”

Sarah Dessen book Keeping the Moon

Source: Keeping the Moon

Time , Patience

“All genders?' whispered Nudge. 'Aren't there just the two'
I shrugged. 'No idea. Maybe they've created others.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Idea

“All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Life , Truth

“I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.”
Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Study , Time , Sea

“Right there, in front of everyone, I threw my arms arond his neck and mashed my mouth against his. He was startled for a second, then his strong arms wraped around me so tightly I could hardly breathe.
"ZOMG," I heard Nudge whisper.”

James Patterson book Maximum Ride

Source: Max

Strong

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

World

“The imporant things in life never happened by accident. But even with those things that were meant to be, sometimes you had to wait awhile and then maybe give them a little nudge.”

Nicholas Evans (1950) British producer and writer

Life , Waiting

“You cannot force commitment, what you can do…You nudge a little here, inspire a little there, and provide a role model. Your primary influence is the environment you create.”

Peter M. Senge (1947) American scientist

“Nudge threw her arms around my neck. 'I love you Max! I love all of us too!'
Yeah, me too,' Said the Gasman. 'I don't care if we have our house, or a cliff ledge, or a cardboard box. Home is wherever we all are, together.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Love , Home , Housing , Box

“What test?" Asked Nudge.
"Max, you're incorruptible."
"Only by power." I said. "You haven't tried chocolate yet.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

“Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared. […]It's slow. It rots out your guts.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

Men , Failure , Fight

“Nudge: "I look like prep school Barbie. (looks at Max) Actually, you look like prep school Barbie. I'm just Barbie's friend.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

School

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

Tom Stoppard The Real Thing

Henry, Act II, scene V
Source: The Real Thing (1982)

Children , World , Thinking , Dead

“Jeez, was that a lion? Please tell me it’s behind bars.”
“It’s a zoo, Iggy,” Nudge said, taking his arms and leading him. “Everything’s behind bars.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“I didn't know a van could go up on two wheels like that, for so long." -Nudge”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“I love Nudge, Nudge is a great kid, but that motormouth of hers could
have turned Mother Teresa into an ax murderer”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Love

“It was his subconscious which told him this — that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 17

Parting , Personality

“Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Know what I mean?”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

“Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. … This information doesn't have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn't have to be "represented" in "data structures" in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes. So there is wisdom, particularly about preferences, embodied in the rest of the body. By using the old bodily systems as a sort of sounding board, or reactive audience, or critic, the central nervous system can be guided — sometimes nudged, sometimes slammed — into wise policies. Put it to the vote of the body, in effect….When all goes well, harmony reigns and the various sources of wisdom in the body cooperate for the benefit of the whole, but we are all too familiar with the conflicts that can provoke the curious outburst "My body has a mind of its own!" Sometimes, apparently, it is tempting to lump together some of the embodied information into a separate mind. Why? Because it is organized in such a way that it can sometimes make independent discriminations, consult preferences, make decisions, enact policies that are in competition with your mind. At such time, the Cartesian perspective of a puppeteer self trying desperately to control an unruly body-puppet is very powerful. Your body can vigorously betray the secrets you are desperately trying to keep — by blushing and trembling or sweating, to mention only the most obvious cases. It can "decide" that in spite of your well-laid plans, right now would be a good time for sex, not intellectual discussion, and then take embarrassing steps in preparation for a coup d'etat. On another occasion, to your even greater chagrin and frustration, it can turn a deaf ear on your own efforts to enlist it for a sexual campaign, forcing you to raise the volume, twirl the dials, try all manner of preposterous cajolings to persuade it.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Wisdom , Secret , Sex , Way

“Standing in the door ready to jump behind Cassidy, I saw the plane on our wing hit by ground fire and flames start licking back from the engine under the fuselage. Cassidy was so fascinated by the sight that I had to nudge him to remind him that the jump signal was on. Later I learned that the Air Force pilots of the burning plane never wavered in their steady course to the drop zone where the parachutists jumped to safety while the pilots crashed to their deaths.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 88

Death , Learning

“Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. That’s for them to believe. I don’t believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with. I believe mankind in general has a need to believe in higher powers and an existence not limited to the physical duration of the body. But these needs are hopes, and believing them doesn’t make them true. I believe mankind feels a need to gather in churches, whether physical or social. I’ve spent hours and hours in churches all over the world. I sit in them not to pray, but to gently nudge my thoughts toward wonder and awe. I am aware of the generations there before me and the reassurance of tradition.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Source: Life Itself : A Memoir (2011), Ch. 54 : How I Believe In God

Men , God , World , Hope

“The divine tape recorder holds a million scenarios, each perfectly sensible. Little quirks at the outset, occurring for no particular reason, unleash cascades of consequences that make a particular feature seem inevitable in retrospect. But the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible channel, diverging continually from its original pathway. The end results are so different, the initial perturbation so apparently trivial.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), pp. 320–321

History

“Any hound a porcupine nudges
Can't be blamed for harboring grudges.
I know one hound that laughed all winter
At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"The Porcupine" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-porcupine/

Winter

“Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold—one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity—a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years …”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 2 (“Troubadour”), pp. 38-39

Women , World , Law , Intelligence

“There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Locations: An Introduction" (pp. xix-xx)
American Fictions (1999)

Books , Soul , Daughters

“So who makes the choice then for you, Homer? Once again, progressives know better than you, and you are now paying to have Cass Sunstein, a guy who I say is the most dangerous man in America, because first it's nudge, then it's shove, then it becomes shoot. Some will argue, "Aw come on, it's only about school lunches, what's the big deal, it's school lunches." Really? I don't know about you, but I don't want the federal government in my schools- in my kid's lunch bag.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

on program to encourage schoolchildren to pick fruits and vegetables in their school lunches. Cass Sunstein co-authored the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
2010s, 2010

School , Guy

“I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

interview with Joan Gordon

Way , Game , Sense

“Your habitual thinking patterns either encourage you toward excellence or nudge you into weakness.”

Tommy Newberry American writer

The 4:8 Principle.
The 4:8 Principle (2007)

Thinking

“He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him.
But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights
delights went through him.
His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down.
But the pedal floored easy without a sound.
He said "Christ!"
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now.
He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide,
riding on his fear-hunched back
was every one of those yellow green
I'm telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

30,000 Pounds of Bananas
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Fear , Light , Christ , Speed

“Despite the beliefs and teachings of religion and psychology, impulses are biological and psychic directional signals to nudge the individual toward his or her greatest opportunities for expression and development privately, and also to insure the person's contribution to mass social reality.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 17

Religion , Reality , Personality

“My favourite memories involve the actual process of writing sketches - just a few guys lounging around in a room talking nonsense, until suddenly an idea would start to coalesce, and you'd start nudging it toward fruition. I've never laughed so much before or since. Also, there were those very, very few nights where you'd be on a stage and some strange contract developed between performers and audience, and everything you did was funny. That was magical - and a direct visceral experience that you never really get from writing prose.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

On his time with the Cambridge Footlights
Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Guy , Idea , Memory , Night

“During my high school years, a boy from my neighborhood named Malcolm chose me to be his friend for a season. His elbow nudged my book in the public library one Saturday afternoon as he sprawled forward across the table feigning some condition—boredom, I suppose. His voice was like shadow—as whispery and as indistinct as shadow, due to an adolescent change. “Do you want to wrestle?” he asked. I have never met anyone since who speaks as Malcolm spoke: He daydreamed; he pronounced strategies out loud (as I raked elm leaves from our lawn and piled them in the curb)—about how he would befriend this boy or that boy, never anyone I knew; Malcolm went to a different high school. “First,” he said, “I will tease him about his freckles. Then I will tease him about his laugh—how his laugh sounds a little like a whinny sometimes. I won’t go too far. You should see how his wrist pivots as he dribbles down the court. “He’s got these little curls above his sideburns. I wish I had those.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

(He would catch me up on the way to the library.) “What are you reading? We read that last year. Not really a war story, though, is it? Want to go eat French toast?”
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

War , Books , School , Way

“Chrétien is nothing if not versatile: popular, recherché, allusive, insistent, arch, naïve, racy and demure…He has a dramatist's flair for the handling of dialogue, a deft and economic way with characterization, the sharp confidence of the logician in his handling of rhetorical figures and the self-assurance of the entertainer in the deployment of humour (he is master of the verbal nudge). It is his essential vivacity that one misses most in his imitators.”

Chrétien de Troyes book Yvain, the Knight of the Lion

Tony Hunt "Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romance, Yvain", in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 128.
Criticism

Way , Confidence

“Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
Context: We are living in an era of populism and demagoguery. And yes, there’s racism and xenophobia mixed into it. But what we are also seeing, it seems to me, is the manifest return of a distinctive political and intellectual tendency with deep roots: reactionism.
Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic. If conservatives value elites, reactionaries seethe with contempt for them. If conservatives believe in institutions, reactionaries want to blow them up. If conservatives tend to resist too radical a change, reactionaries want a revolution. Though it took some time to reveal itself, today’s Republican Party — from Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution to today’s Age of Trump — is not a conservative party. It is a reactionary party that is now at the peak of its political power.

Age , Hell , Memory , Passion

“Everybody knows someone in their life that is already an amazing public servant… Nominate that amazing public servant to take their service to the halls of Congress. Give them that nudge. My brother did it for me.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Quoted in [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helps recruit a new wave of Democrats, NY Post https://nypost.com/2019/01/16/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-helps-recruit-a-new-wave-of-democrats/ (16 January 2019)
Quotes (2019)

Life

“A case could be made for Mr. Ellis as a covert moralist and closet sentimentalist, the best kind, the kind who leaves you space in which to respond as your predispositions nudge you, whether as a commissar or hand-wringer or, like me, as an admirer of his intelligence and craft.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

George Stade, The New York Times Book Review.

Intelligence