Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.
Moral stories are always imaginary , but these stories induce real moral values in a human society .
Some men wonder over God's values, others over the cut of a garment.
The cow does not know the value of her tail till she has lost it.
The person who has been a slave from birth does not value rebellion.
Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or ou...
if you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. And if yo...
Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?" "From you, Pappa", I said. "From me? I don't know any of this". "You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it....
How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of those shard human (and indeed also most divine) attributes that are supposed to distinguish us a...
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, sol...
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
It was one thing to jack off. It was another thing to jack off and not secure your shit before you opened a goddamned door. That was like, Puberty 101. Or Being a Guy 101. Or Basic Fucking Common Sense 101.
In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.
Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.
I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.
My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.
-our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.
I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.
The mystery religions were instituted in order to protect the marvels of the commonplace from those who would devalue them.
I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class scene since the war, and in particular my generation's part in it. We had spent our early years as privileged members of a privileged class. How were we faring in the Age of the Common Man? How ought we to b...
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
