Attention and Awareness

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
--David Foster Wallace

Digital Media

I bow to no one in my loyalty to digital media. Our household has two iPads, two Kindles, and a Nook. They are the future, and for traveling they can't be beat. But I am reminded that five centuries' worth of ergonomic advancements in laying out printed material have not been overturned in one decade. There is still something very nice about the look, feel, and impression on the eye, the senses, and the memory of a well-designed physical magazine or book.
--James Fallows

Education

Education is simply the soul of society as it passes from one generation to another.
--G. K. Chesterton

Worries

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
--Mark Twain

Irony

Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends.
--Paul Fussell

Clear

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.
--Wislawa Szymborska (In Praise of Self-Deprecation)

Special Act

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
--Charles Darwin

Decisions

Considering the potentially momentous nature of even the smallest decisions we make, we ought to be terrified and humbled, we ought to be filled with gratitude for every grace we receive.
--Dean Koontz

Expert

Define expert as you will, but it's rarely warranted in any field by but a tiny handful.
--Suzanne Clothier

Attention

We create ourselves by how we invest the energy of our attention.
--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Storm

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.
--Mark Twain

Consumer Benefit

Advertising isn't interested in political regeneration. The purpose is to nurture foolish thoughts, and the laziness of mind suckled at the silicone breasts of CBS and Disney counts as a consumer benefit.
--Lewis Lapham

Trustworthy

A liberal, free market society needs "trust in the trustworthy" as the core of its values, not just as a Quixotic moral "extra."
--Geoffrey Hosking

Swing Voters

Expect to hear complaints from the right that it's unfair for Obama to come out with positions in an election year that appeal to swing voters.
--Daniel Gross

Freedom to Marry

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
--Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority in Loving v. Virginia (1967)

Procrastination

Worry is not productive; it's a kind of procrastination.
--Tim Kreider

Capitalism

Although capitalists would prefer we think otherwise, human ingenuity created capitalism--not the other way around.
--Frank Joyce

Together

We betray so much so casually when we choose to forget about the only thing that's really worth caring about, which is the only thing we've all got, which is each other--which is all of us, all of us together or all of us lost.
--David Roth

Tenderness

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us.
--Dean Koontz

Word Work

Word-work is sublime...because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
--Toni Morrison

Distress

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.
--Karl Marx

Everybody Worships

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
--David Foster Wallace