Quotes from Jonathan Rauch

Some ideas actually are false, and at some point the process of checking establishes their falsehood so firmly that to proceed as if they might be true becomes ridiculous. For

They included a chart showing that in Latin America life satisfaction declines from the twenties to about age forty-eight, then increases. "Studies in advanced industrial economies find a similar relationship," they wrote, "although the low point on the happiness curve usually occurs either slightly earlier or slightly later, depending on the country.

John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, the big three of modern liberalism

sank. It dawned upon me that I was becoming someone I didn't like. I began to feel defined by my ingratitude.

In the midst of the declining governing capacity of the American democratic order, we ought to focus less on 'participation' as the magical solution and more on the real dynamics of how to facilitate the organization of effective political power.

A solid group of 100 or so [cognitive] biases has been repeatedly shown to exist,

The greater threat lies in our letting down our guard against ourselves: in high-mindedly embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion, as the Marxists did. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.

If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.28 Peirce, all those years ago, got it right.

liberal science is nothing other than a selection process whose mission is to test beliefs and reject the ones that fail.

As "teenager" became a group identity, a distinctive teen ethos and identity emerged; youth culture, as it became known, was born.

it has faced the challenge of establishing its relevance to baby boomers who reject the Leisure World model of late adulthood

universities need to make defending pluralism a top institutional priority, not an afterthought. If they do not, politicians—the world's worst judges of scientific integrity—will try to do it for them.

Leider and Webber stress that big transitions aren't DIY projects and that, as Webber told me, isolation kills. "It's pretty lonesome inside your own head," Webber said, when I spoke with him about the project. "Everybody's life is an experiment of one, but nobody should have to go it alone.

We prefer to think of time as our servant, something we use and fill, rather than as our master, shaping

Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.

She was confident of her skills, but "How would I take them and make the transition to the not-for-profit sector? What's even out there? How do I get a foot in the door? There's no clear path here.

One of the biggest causes of suffering is social comparison," Coleman said. "Status anxiety is a huge component of this kind of self-torture. Have I achieved enough? Am I a failure? Am I a success?

When I asked her how she would have fared had she remained out there on her own, fishing for information online and trying to figure out where to begin, she replied that she might eventually have made a successful transition, but the process would have been difficult and demoralizing.

As Lincoln hoped, by using their hearts and their heads, Americans have kept their experiment alive long past the age when most democracies die.

Such is the importance of social channels.

I felt lack of inspiration. What is it at the end I was trying to achieve? Is it a promotion? Is it validation? Is it a great piece of work on TV? It kind of lost its meaning.

They need society's permission to experiment and grow and err: permission which teens and twentysomethings take for granted, but which adults in maturity often need just as much.

As I mentioned, Ardelt and others of her school of thought regard wisdom as combining competence in three areas. One domain is cognitive (relating to knowledge and intellect), the second is affective (relating to compassion and emotion), and the third is reflective—but reflective means something more than mere contemplation.

The liberation of the human mind," H. L. Mencken once wrote, "has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe—that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.