At times in my life, I have been utterly lonely. At other times, I've had disgusting infectious diseases. Try admitting these things in our culture.
When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.
I think there are huge lessons there, for young people who are getting started in life, as well as other people. And that is, to take responsibility for your own life. Only you are responsible for the course you take from there.
The most gloomy prognosis about Jewish life is that it will disappear between the two extremes of ultra-Orthodoxy on the one hand and total assimilation on the other. But those are very exaggerated scenarios.
IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information - and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise.
It's all emotion. But there's nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are on vacation, we are not rational; we are emotional.
Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.
The principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different.
The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it.
We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.
The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.
I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.
She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.
W a gang member, and especially in a Latino gang, gets jumped in, and then he's given a name, and he has that name forever, but it's not so much the name as being called by name.
America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.
I am deeply aware of the dimension of luck. It's so important to be prepared to receive it, but it is a major factor. There's no question.
Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.
Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.
As with almost every significant aspect of the Bush presidency, its handling of 9/11 was a catastrophe from start to finish.
