Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.
Interpretation
Intelligence provides various advantages in life, including better health and financial stability.
This quote by Steven Pinker emphasizes the multifaceted benefits of intelligence throughout an individual's life. It suggests that being smarter not only leads to higher earnings and longer life expectancy but also to healthier relationships and better outcomes for future generations, highlighting the profound impact of intelligence on personal and societal well-being.
In practice
This quote can be used in a graduation speech to encourage students to value their education.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
As from a large heap of flowers many garlands and wreaths are made, so by a mortal in this life there is much good work to be done.
Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
Take advantage of the ambiguity in the world. Look at something and think what else it might be.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
Our prayers run along one road and God's answers by another, and by and by they meet.
He who knows he is a fool is not the biggest fool; He who knows he is confused is not in the worst confusion.
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