Quotes from Hugh Mackay

The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and the values they bring to the viewing experience.

I'm in total sympathy with Dick Smith's sentiments I only wish there were grounds for saying we Australians would never tolerate such appalling treatment of refugees being carried out in our name.

One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.

You have five hundred Facebook 'friends'? That simply means you've redefined 'friend' to make it something like 'a contact I exchange data with'.

You don't have to be rich to leave a positive legacy; you don't have to be intelligent, famous, powerful or even particularly well organised, let alone happy. You need only to treat people with kindness, compassion and respect, knowing they will have been enriched by their encounters with you.

It's inevitable that people who are trying to manipulate, persuade or deceive us in their own interests would try to pretend that they are driven by...the finest expressions of our common humanity - altruism, compassion and kindness. [p63]

There's no such thing as a boring subject, only a bored listener who hasn't bothered to search for the relevance of the message to them.

To listen to someone means devoting time to the process, putting your own concerns on hold, remaining silent even when you're dying to say something. Patient listening also involves a willingness to postpone judgement about what is being said. Mostly, we want to rush in to agree, to disagree, to object, to correct; but listening demands the patience to let all that wait until the other person has finished saying to us what they want to say to us.

We do the right things because it's the right thing to do. We respond to others' needs because they have those needs. Our survival depends on cooperation. [p61, paraphrased]

The truth is that we will learn nothing from our sadness, our suffering, our disappointments or our failures unless we give ourselves time to experience them to the full, reflect on them, learn from them or, in modern parlance, process them.

faced with so much mystery, most of us find it hard to settle for simple awe.

When books sweep the world with characters and plots that seem unutterably grim...you have to ask whether we willingly incorperate such material into our lives because we need more shadows, clouds, drama, or perhaps because vicarious exposure to such material equips us, psychologically, for potential exposure to the real thing. [p35, Chapter 1 Taking the rough with the smooth]

Here's the cardinal rule of the good listener: receive before you respond. [p97]

Forgiveness calls on deep reserves of moral courage: the courage to break out of the spiral of self-pity; the courage to set aside resentment; the courage to rise above biterness; the courage to act well, when all our instincts call on us to act badly. p112

If things just keep going along as smoothly as if we're on a railway track, reassured by the regularity and predictability of that clickety-clack, clickety clack, why would we bother with introspection about the meaning and purpose of it all, let alone the direction we're taking? p37

Homo sapiens. That's a label we invented for ourselves, of course: Latin for 'wise man'. It may be hoped that we will eventually either evolve into something worthier of that appellation or aspire to an even better one. How about Gens unanima - 'harmonious race' or ' a people of one spirit'?

multiculturalism is the art of creating harmony out of diversity. [p58 Chapter 2: We were born to cooperate, not compete]

Stories abound... of governments' heavy reliance on focus groups and other forms of research to pre-test the likely political effect of policies. Not to test the integrity or efficacy of the polices; not to see whether it fits within a particular philosophical framework, merely to test its palatability or, to be brutally frank, its likely contribution to a government's prospects of re-election.

Socrates said that personal fame counts for nothing if your life isn't itself of virtue, and the same goes for political power. We could certainly demand more virtue from our politicians, starting with a more respectful attitude towards each other as legitimately elected members of parliament, and an inflexible commitment to always telling the truth.

we might do well to accept that a noble, courageous, well-lived life is one in which we are equipped to experience and negotiate the full range of emotions: neither seduced by the lure of happiness nor obsessed by the grim and gritty aspects of life, but open to whatever comes and ready to learn from it all.

The integrity of any theory, Kuhn argued, lies in its falsifiability - that is, its openness to the possibility of repudiation in the light of more evidence, fresh insights or a more creative interpretation of data whose significance was not previously understood.

Signs of the purest form of human love: the love that has nothing to do with emotion or affection; the love that say we will treat each other kindly and respectfully, regardless of how we happen to feel about each other, because we know that's the only way a human community can thrive. p19 [Prologue: A Loving Country?]

Certainty is the enemy of reason and of reasonableness.

Words are, of themselves, meaningless. We invest them with meaning, and, over time, come to feel as if certain words mean certain things. We construct dictionaries and then think they tell us what words mean, but dictionaries are mere historical documents, museums of meaning...