Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.

Decision-making power, whether it's on foreign affairs or domestic affairs, is concentrated in the White House in a reasonably small circle.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

The message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.