Never memorise what you can look up in a book.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.

Susan Sontag lists her 10 rules for raising a child:

• Be consistent.
• Don’t speak about him to others (e.g., tell funny things) in his presence. (Don’t make him self-conscious.)
• Don’t praise him for something I wouldn’t always accept as good.
• Don’t reprimand him harshly for something he’s been allowed to do.
• Daily routine: eating, homework, bath, teeth, room, story, bed.
• Don’t allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.
• Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)
• Do not discourage childish fantasies.
• Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his business.
• Don’t assume that what I don’t like to do (bath, hairwash) he won’t like either.

- News organizations are a public trust with the ability to inform and influence the public conversation.

- I know. That’s why I bought one.

Newsroom S01E03

Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.

Prison is a very expensive way of making bad men worse.

I gotta adhere to the rules of getting kids to listen, which are:

• Be consistent.
• Let your kid mess up if they’re hellbent on messing up.
• Remember that, 90 percent of the time, the best parenting is no parenting at all
• Never ask a kid to do anything because they’ll say no; just tell them what you want.
• Keep the words to a minimum because they stop listening after seven seconds.
• When all else fails, BRIBE THE FUCKERS.

The name, the label, covers the poverty of your inner being; you are petty, shallow, and through identification you hope to escape from your own emptiness. So the name, the country, the idea, become all-important, and for that you are willing to die and to kill.

Negde sam pročitao pitanje i odgovor iz intervjua Vitolda Gombroviča pred kraj njegovog života. – Kakvi su vam planovi u budućnosti? – Grob!

Frugality is not about depriving yourself of what you want. It’s about figuring out what you want and then figuring out how you can achieve that.

Promene ne treba očekivati od drugih, niti ih prizivati pred drugima. Sam čovek treba biti promena.

How to diffuse a child’s tantrum with one question

When a tantrum starts — either because the doll’s arm came off, or because it’s time to go to bed, or because the homework did not come out the way she wanted, or because he did not want to do a chore — whatever the reason, we can ask them the following question, looking into their eyes and in a calm voice:

“Is this a big problem, a medium problem, or a small problem?”

What we want to bear is inversely correlated with what we need to hear in order to learn and to grow.

Communication problems, you have them when you don't know you have them, once you know then you don't have them.

How To Be Someone People Love To Talk To

Professor Stephen Ceci taught his class the way he had for the past 20 years, replicating nearly everything imaginable — except he started speaking with more enthusiasm. What happened?

His student ratings went up — in every single category. He was seen as more knowledgeable, more tolerant, more accessible, more organized. Students said they learned more. They felt the grading was fairer. They even said the textbook was better.

If you read the literature on what makes for a meaningful college experience, almost all of the literature stresses the way the student interacts with their institution: when I show up on campus on day one, how do I behave? Do I seek out the most interesting professors and take their classes? Do I willingly throw myself into the experience or do I smoke dope in my room? The variable is you, not the institution.

Hard choices: put choices on the list, try to find which one is the best. If you figure out that you can not then it is a hard problem. In that case, pick and commit to your choice. There are hard and small and hard and big problems.

Quality of to your education depends mainly on you, not that much on the school. There is this illusion that education is prepackaged consumer product that you passively take from the shelf which is wrong.

Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.