Alain de Botton:

Being good has come to feel dishonest. The nun, the parish priest, the self-sacrificing politician; we have been trained to sense fouler impulses behind their gentle deeds.

An exchange:

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Alain de Botton:

In flight from dogmatism, we stand transfixed by the dangers of moral convictions. In the political arena, there is no faster way to insult opponents than to accuse them of trying to undertake the impossible task of improving the ethical basis of society.

One wonders whether the idea of freedom still always deserves the deference we are prepared to grant it; whether the word might not in truth be a historical anomaly which we should learn to nuance and adapt to our own circumstances. We might ask whether for developed societies, a lack of freedom remains the principal problem of communal life. In the chaos of the liberal free-market, we tend to lack not so much freedom, as the chance to use it well.

Freedom worthy of its illustrious associations should not mean being left alone to destroy ourselves. It should be compatible with being admonished, guided and even on rare occasions restricted -- and so helped to become who we hope to be.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

The Limits of Freedom

Louis Menand:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.

As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good.

Gary Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it's all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains -- that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.

Slim Charles:

It's what war is, you know? Once you in it ... you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight!

Menand:

The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.

Is psychopharmacology evil, or is it useless?

Ian Malcolm:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Menand:

Many people today are infatuated with the biological determinants of things.

People like to be able to say, I'm just an organism, and my depression is just a chemical thing, so, of the three ways of considering my condition, I choose the biological. People do say this. The question to ask them is, Who is the "I" that is making this choice? Is that your biology talking, too?

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

Menand:

Do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn't short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don't want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies?

Drew Gilpin Faust:

In the 21st century, we shy away from death, and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one. Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

Head Case

Temple Grandin:

You know what working at the slaughterhouses does to you? It makes you look at your own mortality.

When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple.

An exchange:

Troy: Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!

Jimmy: Wow, Mr. McClure. I was a grade A moron to ever question eating meat.

Troy: Yes you were Jimmy, yes you were.

Lydia Davis:

I look across the road here at how still the cows stand, a lot of the time.

Phil Agre:

Increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with, and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want.

The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational world they were born with.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

Lydia Davis:

When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won't ever have to get bogged down in it again -- the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We're really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that's jiggling. We're all jiggling a little.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Rivka Galchen:

Even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

An exchange:

Dante: You hate people.
Randal: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

An exchange with Michael Haneke:

Q: Why are your films always so disturbing?

A: Audiences are having mainstream cinema and television touch on only the surface of things, and they get irritated when confronted by a more exacting gaze into the depths of our existence.

David Foster Wallace:

Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Hector:

You want to begin in a place that's clean and you make it grow.

Chris Long:

It's almost like Wal-Mart: 'We're going to keep our prices cheap and grow from there.' It works.

Teddy Johnson:

We're a small town. We weren't prepared.

Sam Quinones:

Their success stems from both their product, which is cheaper and more potent than [the competition], and their business model, which places a premium on customer convenience and satisfaction. With six to eight drivers working seven days a week, [they] can gross up to $80,000 a week.

University towns have been especially fertile markets ...

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

Esteban Avila:

At least I'm not going to die wanting to know what's on the other side of that river. I already know.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Freeman Dyson:

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Rivka Galchen:

Every Tuesday night I go and see whatever is playing at the movie theater nearby. I'm not choosy. I'm happy to see whatever everyone else is going to see. That way I stay vaguely in touch without having to talk to people, which is great, because even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

Bumblebee Labs:

People with a passion for everything are not interested in things themselves, they're interested in interest. To them, the actual objects of study are incidental; what fascinates them are the more abstract layers in which everything is interconnected.

When a person who is passionate about one thing meets a person who is passionate about everything, they just assume that this person is passionate about many "one things". What they fail to realize is that the passion is not thing-centric.

Notorious BIG:

The key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it's your first project. Like it's your first day like back when you was an intern. Like that's how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Staff Sgt. David Bellavia:

While on our second patrol in Iraq, a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.

Joel Stein:

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

Lady Bird Johnson:

Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights -- that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.

Economist, last year:

Fully 88% of the EU's stocks are overfished.

NYT Magazine, in 2007:

Editors and writers trawl the oceans of ingenuity, hoping to snag in our nets the many curious, inspired, perplexing and sometimes outright illegal innovations of the past 12 months. Then we lay them out on the dock, flipping and flopping and gasping for air, and toss back all but those that are fresh enough for our particular cut of intellectual sushi.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Dane Klinger and Kimiko Narita:

Because of their status as a delicacy and due to advances in fishing technology, populations of Atlantic bluefin tuna are now severely depleted. Where fishermen once hunted the giant fish with harpoons and hooks, many now use modern vessels equipped with powerful sonar to find fish underwater and radar to track seabirds that gather around tuna schools, as well as giant nets that can efficiently encircle and capture entire schools of bluefin. Most tuna are then held in net pens and fattened on mackerels, sardines, and squid to increase their market value. Unless trends reverse, wild bluefin tuna might become exceedingly rare and off the menu entirely.

Sushi aficionados have over-enjoyed a precious resource. To ensure that bluefin are available for future generations, we must have the courage to make the hard decisions now.

An exchange from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away:

Luke: All right, I'll give it a try.
Yoda: No. Try not. Do ... or do not. There is no try.

Economist:

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.
But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

An exchange:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

An exchange:

Lisa: Dad! Can't you have some other type of party, one where you don't serve meat?
Homer: I'm trying to impress people here Lisa. You don't win friends with salad.

An exchange:

Charlie Rose: Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?
Richard Florida: I hope not, Charlie. I hope not.

Chris Jones:

The lights come back on. Ebert stays in his chair, savoring, surrounded by his notes.

Noteworthy, 2003:

And so a story is broken into pieces, with the releases spaced apart in time, that the audience might take advantage of the intermission to savor the tasty bits of the first course while waiting in eager anticipation of the next.

Roger Ebert:

You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.

Lisa Moore:

There are only so many movies, so many trips, so many new friends, so many family barbecues with the sun going down over the long grass.

It has always been this way.

Finite.

But at forty-five you realize it.

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

Drake Bennett:

Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.

This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.

It turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.

Decius on Sarah Palin:

She is the slick corporate VP who is all image and no substance, and they love that about her because they have convinced themselves that if they do away with substance it will free them from the problems that substantial people attempt to address.

Decius:

It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

In West Virginia:

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists.

"Nooooo!" the audience roared.

John Lanchester:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Easy = True

Peter Lennox:

Economic and management theorists subscribing to the view that unbridled competition offers the greatest efficiency should be made to watch chickens. If one actually lives with chickens, it's a lot harder to treat them as mere objects.

A flock can manage without a cockerel, but a cockerel without a flock is nothing.

Dean Keith Simonton, via John Cloud:

Deliberate practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something.

Kara Hansen:

Like sea lions snacking on Columbia River salmon, it's not the entire bear species causing problems. Bark-peeling is a learned behavior, Higgins said, pointing to research by Wildlife Services in Olympia, Wash.

"One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it," he said. "There are bears that peel and bears that don't peel. We target peeling bears."

Richard Holbrooke:

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

Pecking order

Frank Chimero:

I get excited when I see new tools and I have no idea how to use them.

Steven Frank:

Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things we are used to are going away. Maybe not for a while, but they are.

Fraser Speirs:

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party.

Matt Linderman:

For those of us surrounded by the minutiae of computers all day, it's easy to forget there's a world of people out there who just don't get it. And it's not their fault. It's ours.

Laura Miller:

You're not really paying for an object.

Steve Jobs et al:

Incredible! Amazing! Beautiful!

Steven Johnson:

It's apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see.

Frank Chimero:

I look at it and all I see is potential.

Walt Mossberg:

I think people who are focused on the hardware ... are missing the key thing here.

David Carr:

One of the things you have to understand about this gadget is ... the gadget disappears pretty quickly. You're looking into pure software.

I think there's a revolution in the fact that you lean back ...

The Kindle ... it looked like something Mennonites made a hundred and fifty years ago.

Steven Johnson:

Time will tell.

And letting time tell is what we need to do.

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

Steve Jobs:

The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had -- and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.

But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you to do something wonderful with.