Education isn't a magic pill. There is no magic pill. But the closest we have is practical expertise and relentless drive.

We're in an era in which we want to believe people have roughly equal potential. IQ gives the lie to that.

When you're going to school primarily for career purposes, it's more important to focus on which program is best for you. In addition, your success at college depends far more on what you do at the college than at which college you do it: Choosing the right program, then the right advisor, the right courses, the right term papers, the right co-curricular activities, the right fieldwork, the right internships. You can make those choices at any college.

Liberalism's key principle is to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have nots. That takes money from the entities with the greatest potential to improve society (for example, corporations that create jobs, invent life-saving medicines, etc.) and redistributes it to the people, whom on average, will never contribute more to society than to hold a menial job.

Essayists write at a length that enables them, within a year, to explore a number of topics, whereas in a book, they'll likely only get to address one.

I think people's feeling the need to be more dependent on others is caused more by the lack of good-paying jobs and by today's zeitgeist that insists it takes a village. That's disempowering although possibly true for many people.

I'm one of the many people for whom coffee helps but often, inattention is a symptom of something else: for example, that you're not getting six to eight hours of sleep.