For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

We're exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies.

The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.

Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.