Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters.
The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is n...
In her inestimable audacity, Julia was the catalyst in my life for something beautiful. I hadn't anticipated her—hadn't even wanted her, truthfully—but there she was. A little something extra that made all the difference in the world.
Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.
He tried to soften his mouth against hers, tried to tell her he was sorry, but she stayed frozen in his arms, as if she couldn't believe, after everything that had happened, that he thought he could break her heart and take a kiss too.
Cognitive insight (knowing something) is not like emotional insight (feeling something). It has no psychodynamic effects. It does not affect the narcissist's behavior patterns, or his interpersonal interactions - the products of well entrenched and r...
If you can pick the baby up without him squirting our of your hands like a bar of soap in the shower, he's not oiled up enough.
Napoleon the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself.
There is no better point of entry to the religious experience than the Sabbath, for all its apparent ordinariness. Because of its ordinariness. The extraordinariness of the Sabbath lies in its being commonplace.
To Alef, the letter that begins the alphabets of both Arabic and Hebrew- two Semitic languages, sisters for centuries. May we find the language that takes us to the only home there is - one another's hearts. ... Alef knows That a thread Of a story St...
This is how I see humanity. When enemies come to your country, destroy the countryside and your village, kill your countrymen, your comrades and the defenseless wounded, you have to kill them and defend your compatriots; that is true humanity.
In the eleventh century obese English king William the Conqueror took to bed and consumed nothing but alcohol to shed pounds, a practice many of his countrymen seem to continue to this day.
Just as war is too important to leave it to the generals, science and technology are too important to leave in the hands of the experts.
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?
To ensure a well-motivated participant, Pfungst rewarded Clever Hans with a small piece of bread, carrot or sugar each time he responded (interestingly, this same procedure still works well with most undergraduate students today).
She knew exactly what he meant. Despite their differences, of their differences, they were a perfect mismatched set. Two sides of the same tarnished penny. An out-of-step Fred and Ginger. Vaughn was just as fucked up as she was - he was just so much ...
Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, so...
No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncer...
We jumped into water so clear and warm that it was like jumping from air to air. The sand rose up under us and we floated to where it met the sea and walked out of the water like creatures in an act of evolution.
To raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren't so damned important.
