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A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
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It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.
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We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.
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I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.
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The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
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Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.
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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
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Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.
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Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
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The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.
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The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
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I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.
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I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.
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I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.
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I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.
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In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles - a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.
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The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.
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The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
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What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
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If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.
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I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing.
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The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.
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It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.