Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.