Quotes from Hugh Mackay

If you want to reinforce someone's existing beliefs, attack them.

There's plenty of symmetry in revenge, but no virtue.

How we respond in the face of a challenge tells us more about who we really are than all the pious rhetoric about our alleged attitudes, values or aspirations. [p37]

People with passionate convictions tend to see the world through the lens of their passion - whether psychological, spiritual, or economic - and interpret everything they hear according to whether or not it harmonises with their own one-note samba

Still, most of those effects occur in the context of harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video games, since most children do not become aggressive little monsters.

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.

So, if falling crime rates coincide with the rise of violent video games and increasing violence on TV and at the cinema, should we conclude that media violence is causing the drop in crime rates?

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.