If it feels all right for you, it’s probably OK.
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 prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.
If you’re a soldier or marine in an Arab country, Islam is the solution. And you need to show respect.
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.
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.
Economists sometimes do try to reduce behavior to law-like predictability. But people respond differently to different primes, to different contexts even from one moment to the next. We possess multiple selves that are aroused by different circumstances.
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.
I don’t think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.
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.
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?
People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.
Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure.
It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
The rich don’t exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.
Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.
Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being.