When your institution is under assault, you’re feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don’t turn inward, go outward.
When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there’s a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.
I’m thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.
There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health.
No matter where you are on politics, I think it is wonderful to see candidates funding campaigns not by talking to a very small number of very rich people, but by reaching out to a very large number of citizens.
I wasn’t born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.
The drugs are just growing all around the country, and so, it all feeds into problems that are not just urban, but are just spread throughout the country.
I do think trying to live each day as a bunch of moral occasions, did I live up to what I would hope, and, if I didn’t, what can I do tomorrow to be a little better, I do think we can improve. We get better at life as we get older.
The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.
I’m a pundit. I’m, like, paid to be a narcissistic blowhard and be in front of the camera.
We live in a culture of a big me. We’re encouraged – we raise our kids to think how great they are, where we have to market ourselves to get through life. We’re in social media, where we broadcast highlight – highlight reels of our own lives on Facebook.
Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it’s not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what’s my problem?
Sometimes, you go – you achieve a few things in life. I have achieved more career success than I ever experienced or that I ever thought. And I just realized, it doesn’t make you happy. It’s an elemental truth. It’s so true.
I wouldn’t say philosophy and theology are dead. Brain science doesn’t invent new philosophies but it helps remind us which of our existing philosophies are more true.
I think the presidency is a bad way to measure the effective campaign finance, because in the presidency, there is so much publicity, there’s so much money floating around.
The incumbents just have a ton more money because they have rigged the system to help themselves, because they have these networks of small donors. Meanwhile, the amount of people, the incumbents being reelected has just been – that has been going up and up and up.
Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.
We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.
Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.
The self-effacing person is soothing and gracious, while the self-promoting person is fragile and jarring. Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space – self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry. Humility is infused with lovely emotions like admiration, companionship, and gratitude.