My Ishmael

Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.

Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.

How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion.

Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot — a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.

Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.

What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.

The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.

The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.

You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.

We made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wired. No one even hit us with a water balloon.

No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.

A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the