War Cannot Be Used As

When Our Children Are Old Enough, And If We Can Afford To, We Send Them To College, Where ... The Point Is To Acquire The Skills Not Of Positive Thinking But Of Critical Thinking.

Marx Was Wrong: It Is Not Only The 'means Of Production' That Shape Societies, But The Means Of Destruction. In Our Own Time, The Costs Of War, Or Just War Readiness, Are Daunting. ... The Resulting Cost Squeeze Has Led To A New Type Of Society, Perhaps Best Terms A 'depleted' State, In Which The Military Has Drained Reources From All Other Social Functions.

The Secret Of The Truly Successful ... Is That They Learned Early In Life How Not To Be Busy.

Even Healthy Families Need Outside Sources Of Moral Guidance To Keep Those Tensions From Imploding--and This Means, Among Other Things, A Public Philosophy Of Gender Equality And Concern For Child Welfare. When Instead The Larger Culture Aggrandizes Wife Beaters, Degrades Women Or Nods Approvingly At Child Slappers, The Family Gets A Little More Dangerous For Everyone, And So, Inevitably, Does The Larger World.

Human Intellectual Progress, Such As It Has Been, Results From Our Long Struggle To See Things 'as They Are,' Or In The Most Universally Comprehensible Way, And Not As Projections Of Our Own Emotions. Thunder Is Not A Tantrum In The Sky, Disease Is Not A Divine Punishment, And Not Every Death Or Accident Results From Witchcraft. What We Call The Enlightenment And Hold On To Only Tenuously, By Our Fingernails, Is The Slow-dawning Understanding That The World Is Unfolding According To Its Own Inner Algorithms Of Cause And Effect, Probability And Chance, Without Any Regard For Human Feelings.