849 Quotations Found

For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for. That raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. […] The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. … [ Read more ]

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.

Author: William Bruce Cameron | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We can think our way into a new way of acting, and we can also act our way into a new way of thinking.

Author: Alisa Cohn | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Rage and frenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.

Author: Edmund Burke | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

[Daniel Kahneman’s] central message could not be more important, namely, that human reason left to its own devices is apt to engage in a number of fallacies and systematic errors, so if we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we ought to be aware of these biases and seek workarounds. That’s a powerful and important discovery.

Authors: Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Fear, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names […] but we recognize … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

When you realize you probably have enough, you become much less anxious about uncertainty: you think, “I could try something new, I have enough,” rather than, “How do I get more?”

Author: Nathan Furr | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.

Author: Chris Hedges | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

When those accustomed to breaking things try to build them, they seem to have little idea of how much work it actually takes. They seem to think that actual accomplishments are there for the taking, and that splashy announcements and dramatic actions can solve intricate problems.

Author: Heather Cox Richardson | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the … [ Read more ]

Author: Sylvia Plath | Subject: Life & Society

By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. [James Davison] Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

James Davison Hunter… reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.

American culture, Hunter argues, was formed … [ Read more ]

Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: America, Culture, History, International, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

It is better to die for an idea that will live than live for an idea that will die.

Author: Steve Biko | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy

We don’t know our true values until they’re tested. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” We don’t know if we’re actually honest until we tell the truth when the truth will hurt us.

Authors: C.S. Lewis, David French | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Truth | Right | Wrong

It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

Author: David French | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Truth | Right | Wrong

I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.

Author: David French | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

[Paul O’Keefe] and two co-authors—[Carol] Dweck and Greg Walton of Stanford—recently performed a study that suggests it might be time to change the way we think about our interests. Passions aren’t “found,” they argue. They’re developed.

Author: Olga Khazan | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Career, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Power is always dangerous. It attracts the worst and corrupts the best. Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.

Author: Ragnar Lothbrok | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Power

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. … [ Read more ]

Author: Bell Hooks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships