Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.