Quote

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.

Jeffrey Kluger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jeffrey Kluger
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: May 21
Author
Contributing Editor
Journalist
Lawyer
Screenwriter
Writer
Best
Parents
Relative
Overweening
Children
Wind
Legacy
Households
Least
Schools
Sibling
Parent
Shot
Genetic
Sense
Shots
Foods
School
Wear
Attend
Also
Importance
Household
May
Clothes
Multiple

More quotes by Jeffrey Kluger

Image
The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it consciousness because it's a species we dislike.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Kids are anarchy writ large.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings, half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Narcissism, like the other personality disorders, is a condition that's known as ego-syntonic. In other words, the paranoid person really does believe that people are after him, and the narcissist really does believe that he or she is better than or more entitled than other people, and truly doesn't see why that's not the case.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depend on the individual, and everyone has a different threshold.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Becoming food savvy is one thing, but it's amazing how fast savvy turns to snooty, and snooty leaves you preparing three-hour meals that break your budget and that the kids won't even eat.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
The brain sits snugly inside the skull, but it's not a completely flush fit - there is still a layer of fluid between bone and soft tissue that serves as a natural shock absorber. Some shocks, however, can't be absorbed, and when the head gets clobbered too hard, the brain can twist or torque or rattle around inside its skeletal casing.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
There may be no more-radioactive term in the English language than what we now almost always refer to as the 'n-word' - itself a coy means of linguistic sidestepping that is a sign of how perilous it is to utter the thing in full, even in conversations about language.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that home explode, too.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
There are a lot of downsides to being male. We age faster and die younger. But give us this: we're lifetime baby-making machines. Women's reproductive abilities start to wane when they're as young as 35. Men? We're good to go pretty much till we're dead.
Jeffrey Kluger
Image
Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.
Jeffrey Kluger