The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.

It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.

Control over consciousness cannot be institutionaliz ed. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.

Often we don't have a good notion of what our talents are, because we have never had a chance to try them out.