Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive.
Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.
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 do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.
In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it’s about self-confrontation.
I think Americans expect optimism in their leadership. The most popular and effective leaders, whether it was Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy, brought to it a sense of optimism and possibility.
It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.
Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.
People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.
The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That’s the natural genetic reaction.
The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.
The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.
Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.
We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.
Pain now is better than pain deferred.
Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.
The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it’s almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that’s going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world.
America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.
Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we’ve sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.