When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.

We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.

The government is supposed to provide a level playing field where people can compete fairly. It's not supposed to cut deals with one company or another to do so.

We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions.

The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.