“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”

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“Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it.”

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“50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.”

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“As a whole, U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people. Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere. Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.”

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“Fridgelandia was an amazing sight. Battered white boxes, stacked up hundreds of feet in every direction. Teams of workers in gas masks and crinkly hazmat suits, scooping out the writhing contents with plastic snow shovels. If people didn’t shovel quickly, carnivorous dragonflies would descend on the maggots in such clouds that workers couldn’t see.”

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“By 2100, the richest 1 percent might own not merely most of the world’s wealth but also most of the world’s beauty, creativity, and health.”

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“Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.”—Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers (2019)

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“Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid.”

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“Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history has progressed, they have come to know less and less.”

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“What Hobbes suggested was that the choice is not between authority and liberty, but between authority of one sort and authority of another. Someone always rules; the question is who. In a world without a Leviathan, which is to say a strong state capable of making and enforcing universal rules, people will be ruled by thousands of miniature Leviathans closer to home—by the feudal lords on whose soil they work and against whom they have few defenses; by powerful, whimsical, unaccountable princes.”

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“Elites do not just increasingly marry each other but also increasingly stay married and raise children within mature, stable marriages. This difference increasingly distinguishes the elite from not just the poor but also the middle class. And the distinction confers a massive advantage on children born into rich families.”

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“Don’t keep score. It’s human nature to inflate your own contribution to the relationship and minimize your partner’s. Couples who are always taking notes on who’s done what for whom waste energy, and ultimately both feel as if they’re in the loss column.”

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“If someone wanted to create an environment of perpetual anger and intergroup conflict, this would be an effective way to do it. Teaching students to use the least generous interpretations possible is likely to engender precisely the feelings of marginalization and oppression that almost everyone wants to eliminate.”

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“My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest.”

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“Today people think of Stoics—like, you know, like they’re people who grit their teeth and tolerate pain and suffering. But that’s not it at all. What they are is, they’re serene and confident in the face of anything you can throw at them.”—Tom Wolfe

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“It’s long been true of mainstream American feminism that the most supposedly radical factions have been closet conservatives, dedicated to recycling the most conventional versions of feminine virtue and delicacy.”

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