Top 70 Jeffrey Kluger Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

2. “There’s a universe inside your head – a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It’s everything you are – and it’s an utter mystery.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

3. “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

4. “All behavioral or mood disorders – including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction – have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

5. “Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

6. “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

7. “We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

8. “A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can’t therefore argue that the net doesn’t exist. Just ask the fish.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

9. “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

10. “Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever – stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

11. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

12. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

13. “Photography is about freezing a moment in time; McGinley’s is about freezing a stage in a lifetime.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

14. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

15. “The golden child may be the oldest one, unless it’s the youngest. It may be the toughest one, unless it’s the most sensitive. It’s not even necessary that Mom and Dad have the same favorite – and typically they don’t.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

16. “A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes – as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

17. “Suffering is always hard to quantify – especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as Alzheimer’s. Most illnesses attack the body; Alzheimer’s destroys the mind – and in the process, annihilates the very self.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

18. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

19. “If you’re an older sibling and you have a younger sibling who needs mentoring or is afraid of the dark, you develop nurturing and empathic skills that you wouldn’t otherwise have.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

20. “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

21. “Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others need something to get their pilot light lit?”

— Jeffrey Kluger

22. “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

23. “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

24. “Tamerlan Tsarnaev is telling no tales. The older of the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings was likely the one who planned the attack, but when he died in a shootout with police just days after the blasts, his thoughts and motivations vanished with him.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

25. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

26. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

27. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

30. “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

31. “Habitual texters may not only cheat their existing relationships, they can also limit their ability to form future ones since they don’t get to practice the art of interpreting nonverbal visual cues.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

32. “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.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

33. “There’s a deep-freeze of sorts for all good intentions – a place that you store your plans to make changes in your life when you know you’re not going to make them at all.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

34. “As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don’t adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

35. “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?”

— Jeffrey Kluger

36. “It’s not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it’s extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

37. “Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

38. “Toxins love to get you while you’re young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it’s mature and comparatively fixed.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong – which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed; they just fail to act on that knowledge.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

42. “Kids are anarchy writ large.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

43. “A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge – out of fairness to goats.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

44. “Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer’s market was, well, for farmers, and the word ‘locavore’ sounded vaguely like a mythical beast.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

45. “There’s a reason narcissists don’t learn from mistakes and that’s because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one. It’s always an assistant’s fault, an adviser’s fault, a lawyer’s fault. Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they’ll say, ’what mistake?”

— Jeffrey Kluger

46. “There was no established way for a man to tell his wife he was going to the moon. A man could tell his wife he was going to sea or going to war; men had been doing that for millennia. But the moon? It was a whole new conversation.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

47. “Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

48. “Never mind what you’ve heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

49. “There’s no such thing as downtime for your brain.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

50. “We are all born with an innate understanding of interpersonal equity – the idea that if you lend me your rake today, I’ll respond in kind when you come to borrow my shovel tomorrow. Or nearly all of us are born with that. Psychopaths aren’t.”

— Jeffrey Kluger