Kris > Kris's Quotes

“It's like we're surrounded by this big, all-you-can-eat buffet of incredible experiences and insights and feelings and opportunities and things and people and ways to share our gifts with the world, and all we have to do is align our energy with what we want and take decisive action to allow this good in our lives.”
― Jen Sincero, You Are a Badass / You Are a Badass at Making Money

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson

“am no longer manipulated by racist ideas to see racial groups as problems. I no longer believe a Black person cannot be racist. I am no longer policing my every action around an imagined White or Black judge, trying to convince White people of my equal humanity, trying to convince Black people I am representing the race well. I no longer care about how the actions of other Black individuals reflect on me, since none of us are race representatives,”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“May the saints of all the stars and constellations bring you hope as they guide you out of the dark and into the light, on this voyage and the next. And all the journeys still to come. For now and evermore. - The Doctor.”
― Chris Chibnall

“I maintain a four-column list:

1. The people I know and who know me, but I should get to know better.

2. The people I know, but they don't yet know me.

3. The people that know me but I don't know them.

4. The people I don't know, but I should.”
― Lauren Hasson, The DevelopHer Playbook: 5 Simple Steps to Get Ahead, Stand Out, Build Your Value, and Advocate for Yourself as a Woman in Tech

“When choosing committees, look for opportunities that will help you level up as opposed to volunteering for the sake of volunteering. Ultimately, what I am involved in today either fulfills me personally, or it fulfills a strategic objective. Try everything once and then whittle down your list by evaluating afterwards with these questions:

- Did I meet the people I wanted to meet?
- Did it help me meet people who have influence?
- Will it bring me visibility?
- Will it get me decision-making power or a seat at a table I wouldn't normally get a seat at?
- Is it worth attending again?

It wasn't long after I started prioritizing networking that people began to notice that i was looped in. When people came to me with their work issues, I either had the answers to their questions, or I knew exactly where to send them. Since I had networked across all levels within my company, I was in a unique position to be helpful up and down the org chart.”
― Lauren Hasson, The DevelopHer Playbook: 5 Simple Steps to Get Ahead, Stand Out, Build Your Value, and Advocate for Yourself as a Woman in Tech

“As an introvert, going home and sitting on my couch often appeals to me more than going to a breakfast, or a meetup, or a day-long conference. Like I felt that day at the first hackathon, sometimes I really don't want to show up. One of the most important deals I made with myself was to make networking micro-commitments. These are the three small commitments that I make with myself before an event, and you need to make these commitments, too:

1. I will show up.

2. I will meet three people, and then I can high tail it out of there.

3. I will show up one more time.

I've honored these micro-commitments consistently.”
― Lauren Hasson, The DevelopHer Playbook: 5 Simple Steps to Get Ahead, Stand Out, Build Your Value, and Advocate for Yourself as a Woman in Tech

“What Trump intuitively understood, and which completely eluded reporters, was that the constant hostility was hurting their cause. Each time Trump was attacked for saying American interests were more important than global concerns, or that American jobs were more valuable than cheap products from other countries, or that rights of Americans should be protected over those of immigrants, normal Americans felt attacked themselves.

And to those Americans, the assault on Trump for expressing rational self-interest on behalf of our country was a breaking point. The growing liberal bias and animosity towards dissenting opinion that had developed over the Obama era had become too great to endure.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.” As this aide saw it, there has been a silent understanding within the national security community that diplomatic, military, and intelligence officers were doing the right thing, quietly risking their lives to protect the American way of life. This aide saw Trump’s move against Brennan as one of the first steps of undercutting America’s democratic system of government and the belief system upon which it was founded. According to the aide, it was the president declaring, “It’s not okay to disagree with me. I can remove you from this work and your career. “If he wanted to, how far could he push this?” this aide asked. “Look back. Did people in the 1930s in Germany know when the government started to turn on them? Most Americans are more worried about who is going to win on America’s Got Talent and what the traffic is going to be like on I-95. They aren’t watching this closely. “I like to believe [Trump] is too self-engrossed, too incompetent and disorganized to get us to 1930,” this aide added. “But he has moved the bar. And another president that comes after him can move it a little farther. The time is coming. Our nation will be tested. Every nation is. Rome fell, remember. He is opening up vulnerabilities for this to happen. That is my fear.” —”
― Philip Rucker, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America

“Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin.
"And what happened?" pressed Ford.
"It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The programme was due at any moment and I felt a bit self-conscious about barging in on some innocent family at sacred tea time. I need not have feared. A young man of about thirty opened the door to me and I asked, 'Do you watch Doctor Who in this house by any chance?' For a split second the young man looked puzzled and then he smiled, opened the door wide, and simply said 'Come in, Doctor.' And in I went.

As he ushered me into the sitting room, I heard the title music and I quietly sat in the chair the man pointed to. As I took my seat, he pointed towards two little boys sitting on the sofa, eyes glued to the screen as I appeared. They watched with terrific intensity as a bit of drama unrolled and then, as someone else took up the plot, they lost interest slightly and glanced up at their dad and then at me. Just as they did so, I reappeared on the screen and they looked at me there. Their amazement was simply amazing! They were utterly gobsmacked as the two images jostled in their heads. They could not grasp how I could be in two paces at once and then, to the delight of their dad, they couldn't believe Doctor Who was in their house. What a wonderful hour or so that was.”
― Tom Baker

“Of course the results of the election were shocking at the time, but in hindsight, they were consistent with the trends of previous elections. Trump continued to build on Republican advantages with the middle class and the non-college educated whites. Meanwhile, the power of identity liberalism to boost turnout among the minority community proved to be a mirage. African American turnout was down significantly from 2008 and 2012 without the nation's first black president on the ticket. And Trump actually increased the share of the vote received from African Americans and Hispanic over Mitt Romney. It turns out the identity liberalism even alienates members of minority groups more concerned about economic issues than niche social justice fights.

Furthermore, Donald Trump was making an appeal based on identity as well -- that of being an American. His patriotic call to Make America Great Again overwhelmed explicit appeals to race, gender and sexual orientation. This universal appeal based on broad issues and common culture trumped identity liberalism.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“First, Trump and congressional Republicans should abandon Washington's obsession with comprehensive reform. Health is the largest sector of the American economy -- 18 percent of GDP -- and the most complex. Comprehensive legislation that affects one-fifth of our economy would be so complicated no one would understand it, and gaining majority support -- much less bipartisan support -- would be impossible.

Instead, health reform needs a slower-paced, transparent, simultaneous, issue-by-issue legislative approach. A series of hearings must be held to gather information and develop specific reforms that will improve health and health care. These hearings would have geographic as well as topical focuses so different citizens in different regions of the country will understand how the bill will affect them personally.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“Second, successful health reform will require a much more morally compelling, persuasive style of communication than Republicans are used to. Eight years of opposing Obama and the temptation to remain negative will be hard to unlearn, but it is essential to governing.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“We have an idea of happiness. We believe that only certain conditions will make us happy. But it is often our very idea of happiness that prevents us from being happy.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

“Health is a moral issue. It is about life and death first. Money comes second.

Trump and the Republicans' vision for health care reform must be about more than repealing Obamacare. It must be about more than insurance. It must create a clear, positive path for twenty-first-century health and health care.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“The imaginations of our nation's entrepreneurs, coupled with the constant discoveries of our scientists, can lead us to this future. But our twentieth-century policies, regulations, and market approaches cannot solve our twenty-first-century challenges. We are also hindered by our big, bureaucratic government and special interests that protect the past at the expense of progress. We must urgently rethink these failing systems and outdated regulations if we are to clear the way for a revolution in health science and technology.

President Trump and congressional Republicans, therefore, must think much bigger and broader than changes in insurance financing to enact real reform that will save lives and save money. Instead, their number one priority should be to replace our current health bureaucracy with a flatter, more transparent, and more accountable health system that embraces innovation.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“Every American should be able to expect certain standards, freedoms, benefits, and opportunities form a twenty-first-century health system. If they are willing to participate and be responsible, they will gain:
•Improved health;
•Longer lives with a much better quality of life;
•A more convenient, understandable and personalized experience -- all at a lower cost;
•Access to the best course of treatment for their particular illness and their unique characteristics;
•A system that fosters and encourages innovation, competition, and better outcomes for patients;
•A system that truly values the impact that medical innovation has on patients and their caregivers as well as on society as a whole;
•A government that facilitates and accelerates extraordinary opportunities to improve health and health care;
•Continuous but unobtrusive 24/7 monitoring of their general health, chronic conditions, and acute health problems;
•Access to the most modern medical knowledge and breakthroughs, including the most advanced technologies, therapies and drugs, unimpeded by government-imposed price controls or rationing;
•The chance to increase their personal knowledge by learning from a transparent system of information about their diagnosis, costs and alternative solutions;
•A continuously improving, competitive, patient-focused medical world in which new therapies, new technologies, and new drugs are introduced as rapidly and safely as possible -- and not a day later;
•Greater price and market competition, innovation and smarter health care spending;
•A system of financing that includes insurance, government, charities, and self-funding that ensures access to health and health care for every American at the lowest possible cost without allowing financing and short-term budgetary considerations to distort and weaken the delivery of care;
•Genuine insurance to facilitate access to dramatically better care, rather than the current system, which is myopically focused on monthly or annual payments;
•A health system in which third parties and government bureaucrats do not impede the best course of treatment that doctors and their patients decide on;
•A health system in which seniors, veterans, or others under government health programs receive the same quality of care as their children in private markt systems.

Big reforms are required to transform today’s expensive, obsolete health bureaucracy into a system that conforms to these principles.”
― Newt Gingrich, Understanding Trump

“The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics—a weight so heavy that it can take an election as bizarre as 2016 and jam the result into the same grooves as Romney’s contest with Obama or Bush’s race against Kerry. We are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“To be fair, something strange had happened. Donald Trump won the election. There was a Maya Angelou quote that ricocheted across social media during the 2016 election: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Trump showed us who he was gleefully, constantly. He mocked John McCain for being captured in Vietnam and suggested Ted Cruz’s father had helped assassinate JFK; he bragged about the size of his penis and mused that his whole life had been motivated by greed; he made no mystery of his bigotry or sexism; he called himself a genius while retweeting conspiracy theories in caps lock.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Even Trump’s team didn’t believe he was going to win. Plans were afoot for him to start a television channel in the aftermath of his loss. And then came election”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“And yet, we have not changed so much, have we? We still coach Little League and care for our parents, we cry at romantic comedies and mow our lawns, we laugh at our eccentricities and apologize for harsh words, we want to be loved and wish for a better world. That is not to absolve us of responsibility for our politics, but to trace a lament oft heard when we step away from politics: Aren’t we better than this?

I think we are, or we can be. But toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“As such, I have found that American politics is best understood by braiding two forms of knowledge that are often left separate: the direct, on-the-ground insights shared by politicians, activists, government officials, and other subjects of my reporting, and the more systemic analyses conducted by political scientists, sociologists, historians, and others with the time, methods and expertise to study American politics at scale. On their own, political actors often ignore the incentives shaping their decisions and academic researchers miss the human motivations that drive political decision-making. Together, however, they shine bright light on how and why American politics work the way it does.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Unfortunately, the term “identity politics” has been weaponized. It is most often used by speakers to describe politics as practiced by members of historically marginalized groups. If you’re black and you're worried about police brutality, that’s identity politics. If you’re a woman and you’re worried about the male-female pay gap, that’s identity politics. But if you’re a rural gun owner decrying universal background checks as tyranny, or a billionaire CEO complaining that high tax rates demonize success, or a Christian insisting on Nativity scenes in public squares — well, that just good, old fashioned politics. With a quick sleight of hand, identity becomes something that only marginalized groups have.

The term “identity politics,” in this usage, obscures rather than illuminates; it’s used to diminish and discredit the concerns of the weaker groups by making them look self-interested, special pleading in order to clear the agenda for the concerns of stronger groups, which are framed as more rational, proper topics for political debate. But in wielding identity as a blade, we have lost it as a lens, blinding ourselves in a bid for political advantage. WE are left searching in vaid for what we refuse to allow ourselves to see.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“This is a profound enough point worth dwelling on for a moment. When a division exists inside a party, it gets addressed through suppression or compromise. Parties don’t want to fight among themselves. But when a division exists between the parties, it gets addressed through conflict. Without the restraint of party unity, political disagreements escalate. An example here is health care: Democrats and Republicans spend billions of dollars in election ads emphasizing their disagreements on health care, because the debate motivates their supporters and, they hope, turns the public against their opponents. The upside of this is that important issues get aired and sometimes even resolved. The downside is that the divisions around them become deeper and angrier.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“Ticket-splitting requires a baseline comfort with both political parties. Behind its demise is the evaporation of that comfort. Amid the battery of questions that surveyors ask Americans in every election lurks something called the “feeling thermometer.” The thermometer asks people to rate their feelings toward the two political parties on a scale of 1 to 100 degrees, where 1 is cold and negative and 100 is warm and positive. Since the 1980s, Republicans’ feelings toward the Democratic Party and Democrats’ feelings toward the Republican Party have dropped off a cliff.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The key idea here is “negative partisanship”: partisan behavior driven not by positive feelings toward the party you support but negative feelings toward the party you oppose. If you’ve ever voted in an election feeling a bit bleh about the candidate you backed, but fearful of the troglodyte or socialist running against her, you’ve been a negative partisan. It turns out a lot of us have been negative partisans. A 2016 Pew poll found that self-described independents who tended to vote for one party or the other were driven more by negative motivations. Majorities of both Republican- and Democratic-leaning independents said a major reason for their lean was the other party’s policies were bad for the country; by contrast, only a third of each group said they were driven by support for the policies of the party they were voting for.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“So here, then, is the last fifty years of American politics summarized: we became more consistent in the party we vote for not because we came to like our party more—indeed, we’ve come to like the parties we vote for less—but because we came to dislike the opposing party more. Even as hope and change sputter, fear and loathing proceed.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority — usually an overwhelming majority — of white vote. Though this changed before Obama — Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers — the election of an African American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized

“The answer, they say, is that the parties we perceive are quite different from the parties that exist. To test the theory, they conducted a survey asking people “to estimate the percentage of Democrats who are black, atheist, or agnostic, union members, and gay, lesbian or bisexual and the percentage of Republicans who are evangelical, 65 or older, Southern, and earn over $250,000 per year.” They were asking, in other words, how much people thought the composition of the parties fit the caricatures of the parties.

Misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party. Democrats believed 44 percent of Republicans earned over $250,000 a year; it’s actually 2 percent. Republicans believe that 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual; the correct answer is about 6 percent. Democrats believe that more than 4 out of every ten Republicans are seniors; in truth, seniors make up about 20 percent of the GOP. Republicans believed that 46 percent of Democrats are black and 44 percent belong to a union; in reality, about 24 percent of Democrats are African American and less than 11 percent belong to a union.”
― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized