Benjamin E. Sasse Quotes
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...there is almost nothing more important we can do for our young than convince them that production is more satisfying than consumption.
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I didn't go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they'd let me play.
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Wealthy societies, for reasons largely well-intentioned but now producing unintended consequences, are making it easier for their teens to avoid the rigors and responsibilities of becoming a grown-up. Arnett calls those years the “self-focused age,” when there are few real responsibilities, few “daily obligations,” limited “commitments to others.” In a stage when young people were once supposed to learn to “stand alone as a self-sufficient person,” they find themselves increasingly paralyzed by over-choice. There are nearly unlimited personal-social options yet too few concrete work-related accomplishments.
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Our goal is for our kids to be intentional about everything they do --- to reject passivity and mindless consumption and to embrace an ethos of action, of productivity, of meaningful work, of genuinely lifelong learning.
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Could we perhaps be rearing a generation that might not be tough enough to be good Americans? For a good American needs to be tough.
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Reverend King knew that the path to success could not be zero-sum—our side wins and your side loses.
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As Putnam demonstrates, poorer, less-educated parents tend to believe that their primary task is getting their children to obey, as opposed to better-educated parents, who emphasize helping their children understand why they ought to obey a given rule. Reading, reasoning, and problem-solving with their parents help children develop the higher-order skills that make them better equipped to face the challenges of a fluid, complex world.
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As The Atlantic’s Julie Beck has written, we’re building “pillow forts” of comfortable information around us and making it more and more difficult for anything we don’t want to hear to penetrate.
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I think I'm one of five people in the Senate who's never been a politician before. And now that I am a politician, what I find weird about it is that I respect myself less.
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In the midst of extraordinary prosperity, we’re also living through a crisis. Our communities are collapsing, and people are feeling more isolated, adrift, and purposeless than ever before.
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It's not natural to have to suffer when we work. We're made to be productive, and yet the world we live in, there's a whole bunch of suffering. And what they need to understand as 10-year-olds, so that when they're 15 and slightly less protected, and when they're 20 and they're moving into a truly semi-independent state, they need to have experienced that memory of persevering and having gotten through hardship.
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We would never have been crazy enough, insulated enough, bubble-wrapped enough, to think that it was impossible to sleep without it—especially at seventy-two degrees.
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And the media plays into his hand, every single time. By April 1, 2016, with a month still to go in the Republican primaries, Donald Trump had received the equivalent of $2 billion in free television coverage. All sixteen of his GOP opponents, by comparison, had received $1.2 billion combined. By the day of the November general election, Trump had earned just under $5 billion in free media—$1.75 billion more than Hillary Clinton.
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We're not at war with all Muslims, we're at war with a subset of Islam that believes in killing in the name of religion, as jihadis do.