Emotion is contagious.

Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement. If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of “smart”?

An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge... It's whether our work fulfills us.

I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.