Thomas Paine on the Cost of Liberty
Powerful words from Thomas Paine, spoken September 11, 1777:
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
Powerful words from Thomas Paine, spoken September 11, 1777:
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
One of the more useful phenomena employed in psychological research is what’s known as “priming.” This idea is simple: get a thought into people’s heads, and it lingers, thereby affecting future thoughts. Hold a cup of hot tea while riding an elevator, and the next person you meet might seem to have a warmer personality!…
Andrew Solomon wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker recently about Adam Lanza’s father and his search for answers to his son’s awful behavior. The piece included a quote I thought I would share with you today: All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the…
In his wonderful 1992 book – Lincoln at Gettysburg – Gary Wills explains that one of the reasons the Gettysburg address was so powerful is that Lincoln did not use any proper names – that’s right any – in the entire address. Consider this portion of the speech: Now we are engaged in a great…
Behavioral economists have written a lot about sunk costs. The idea is pretty simple: once people have invested in an effort – in time or money – they stick with that effort longer than is otherwise justified. They don’t want to feel like they’ve wasted their investment, so they continue to invest even when pulling…
The Cornell Alumni Magazine had a wonderful article recently, on its famous former professor, Carl Sagan. Here is my favorite Sagan quote from that article: Look again at that dot. . . . On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their…
Upon the death of his wife, Thomas Jefferson went into a deep depression. In crushing words, he described his state of mind to his sister-in-law, in a sentence that could be placed in psychiatric manuals next to a definition of depression: “All my plans of comfort and happiness reversed by a single event and nothing…