Quotes from John Tierney

Religious types now feel tremendously energized because they see things swinging back their way. This is exactly the feeling that accompanies the Second Religiousness. Although it seems to suggest a new beginning, it is in fact spelling the end. It's the last hurrah before the total collapse of the civilization. The Roman empire embraced Christianity, and then it died! It was Christianity that assassinated it.

Freud's ideas, as usual, turned out to be both remarkably prescient and utterly wrong.

1, and preferably a little higher. So we'll suggest a guideline that we've taken to calling the Rule of Four: It takes four good things to overcome one bad thing. We offer this as a rough gauge. We're not claiming to have discovered a universal constant like the speed of light or Avogadro's number. It's a rule of thumb, not a law of nature. It doesn't apply to

Look around you. Look closely at your neighbors and the strangers you pass in the streets. Are they starting to morph into fellaheen? Is social media a global electronic machine - a cyber factory - for generating fellaheen ... people who have lost all sense of history and are focused entirely on themselves? Dante called them 'Ignavi' and said they were the most abject people of all.

To survive, life has to win every day. Death has to win just once. A small error or miscalculation can wipe out all the successes. The negativity bias is adaptive, the term biologists use for a trait that improves the odds of survival for an individual or a group.

When the researchers asked adults in the United States, Canada, and India whether life is long or short, and whether it's easy or hard, the North Americans were no more sanguine than the Indians despite their statistical advantages in life expectancy and income.

Harvard Business Review and a subsequent popular book, The No Asshole Rule. In looking for a scientific justification for the no-asshole rule, he discovered the literature on negativity bias and then focused on it in his own