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The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.
The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.
What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.
It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.
The rich don't exploit the poor, they just out-compete them.
It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.
We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?
People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.
A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.
How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character.
To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.
People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap. In this campaign, you just get two guys telling you they really value cleanliness.
We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.
If you do have to look at polls, you should do it no more than once every few days, to get a general sense of the state of the race. I've seen the work on information overload, which makes people depressed, stressed and freezes their brains. I know that checking the polls constantly is a recipe for self-deception and anxiety.
The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.
I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you'll settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?
Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.
People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.
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