The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities.

Kids make their mark in life by doing what they can do, not what they can't... School is important, but life is more important. Being happy is using your skills productively, no matter what they are.

In roughly the last century, important experiments have been launched by such charismatic educators as Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Shinichi Suzuki, John Dewey, and A. S. Neil. These approaches have enjoyed considerable success[...] Yet they have had relatively little impact on the mainstream of education throughout the contemporary world.

A good person is one who follows the Ten Commandments and the golden rule. There is plenty of precedent in history to guide us and we probably evolved to be sensitive to Bible-Golden Rule situations. But the dilemmas faced by a worker - a journalist, an architect, an auditor - or by a citizen (what position to take on stem cell research, whether to run for office, what is the proper balance between taxation and social nets) - are not questions that can be answered by traditional texts or precedents.

I am knowledgeable enough about the world of prizes to realize that there is a large degree of luck - both for the recognitions that you receive and those that you did not.

Part of the maturity of the sciences is an appreciation of which questions are best left to other disciplinary approaches.

No individual can be in full control of his fate-our strengths come significantly from our history, our experiences largely from the vagaries of chance. But by seizing the opportunity to leverage and frame these experiences, we gain agency over them. And this heightened agency, in turn, places us in a stronger position to deal with future experiences, even as it may alter our own sense of strengths and possibilities.