ODDS & ENDS: The Road , Darkness, Showing Up, Diversity, Learning the Hard Way, Lying, Love & Kisses, Good & Evil,

On the Road
"The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began
Now far ahead the Road has gone
And I must follow, if I can
Pursuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet
And whither then? I cannot say."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

On Darkness
"And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained pale eggs of the beast. Rain fell on the towns and the fields. It fell on the tractor sheds and the labyrinth of sloughs. Rain fell on toadstools and ferns and bridges. It fell on the head of John Paul Ziller. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clam shell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the Freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran in the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure…" - Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

On Showing Up
"It was much later that I realized Dad’s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a college president. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say." - Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect

On Diversity
"Diverse groups of problem solvers - groups of people with diverse tools - consistently outperformed groups of the best and the brightest. If I formed two groups, one random (and therefore diverse) and one consisting of the best individual performers, the first group almost always did better. Diversity trumped ability." - Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies Diversity

On Learning the Hard Way
"The native Americans have a magnificent tradition about scars. I have heard the tradition said this way: 'When you die, you meet the Old Hag, and she eats your scars. If you have no scars, she will eat your eyeballs, and you will be blind in the next world.' That story moves awfully fast but it certainly defends the value of scars." - Robert Bly

On Lying
"Above all, I would teach him to tell the truth. Truth-telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: Every single one was a liar." - J. Edgar Hoover

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." - H. L. Mencken

"The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else." - George Bernard Shaw

On Love & Kisses
"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender." - Emil Ludwig

On Good & Evil
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Robert Sapolsky, The Uniqueness of Humans


From FORA.tv
Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz: On Human Progress (Video)

From Jewish World Review
The Other Evil Eye by Yaffa Ganz

From Scientific American
Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative by Nira Liberman and Oren Shapira

MASTERMIND: Dr. George Friedman

Dr. George Friedman is the founder and head of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor). His organization, which provides geopolitical intelligence to businesses, government agencies, and other clients, has been hailed by ABC News as "often able to uncover the globe's best kept secrets and predict world-changing events in ways that no one else can." Barron’s says, "Stratfor has enjoyed an increasing vogue in recent years as a result of its heady geopolitical forecasts and many news breaks." He is the author of a recently released book, The Next Hundred Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century.

Dr. Friedman appeared at the Masters Forum in early 2006. Here are his comments on many and varied subjects.

On American Business
"The single greatest weakness of the American business community is that it does not take seriously the exogenous event. . . The world is infinitely more complex than American businesspeople like to think."

On the Folly of Extrapolation
"It is a grave mistake to try to forecast the future by extrapolating from the present."

• In 1900, Europe was generally prosperous, at peace, and highly interdependent (thirty percent of France’s capital, for example, came from Germany). To most observers, that meant that war was nearly impossible. Books were written saying that no war in Europe could last more than six weeks.

• By 1920, war had shattered Europe, killing millions. Everything that once was solid now was gone. A communist regime ruled Russia. It had taken a million American soldiers in Europe to end the war. Germany was destroyed. Observers saw no possibility that war could reappear.

• By 1940, Germany had conquered all of continental Europe. The Nazis were allied with the Soviets and Italy. To all observers it was clear that 'the fat lady had sung' – the war was over and Germany had won.

• By 1960, Germany had lost the war. The US and the USSR were facing off in Europe, and nuclear war between those superpowers seemed practically inevitable. Since the US had never been defeated in war, it was assumed that such a conflict would be 'won' by the US.

• By 1980, the US had lost a war – in Vietnam. The US was a declining power, and the Soviets were pressing everywhere. The one thing we know in 1980 is that the US has got to make an agreement with the Soviet Union; there has to be a nuclear freeze; the United States cannot keep up this competition, its economy will collapse.

• By 2000, the Soviet Union had collapsed and the US was undergoing the largest economic expansion in its history.

"Common sense doesn’t work. You cannot extrapolate. Anyone who says that twenty years from now everything’s going to be the same only more so is going to be wrong."

On the US Economy
"It’s always a claim that in twenty years the US is going to be a third-rate power. You go back in any time frame, and the one certain common-sense conclusion is the US is finished. It never is, but it’s a conviction."

"The one striking thing about the world, particularly since 1980, is that where everyone else is in a short cycle of economic well-being, military power, and so forth, the US is in a deep, long cycle, and that cycle is ever upward."

"Go out to the Mississippi. Look at it and see the foundation of American power. This incredible river system meant that the farmers in the American Midwest didn’t have to be subsistence farmers ."

"You need a bigger framework than economics. It is useful, but it is a severely limited tool. Purely economic thinking is irrational and empirically false."

"From 1991 to 2001 there was an 'optical illusion' that the world was generally at peace, everyone could 'become an American' – the 'giddy springtime of the bourgeoisie.' But the reality was that the force field that was holding the world together, created by the influences of the US and the USSR, had collapsed."

On the US - Jihadist War
"After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the US was unprepared to respond because its military had been downsized and intelligence was sorely lacking. So President Carter arranged for counterinsurgency efforts by the mujahadeen against the USSR in Afghanistan to be funded by Saudi Arabia, using primarily Saudi fighters, and be housed in Pakistan, with training from American military specialists and the CIA. Osama bin Laden was invented by Jimmy Carter, and that’s just a small exaggeration."

"The Saudis recruited ultra religious militants to conduct the guerrilla war in Afghanistan. They became the core of Al Qaeda. Once the USSR was defeated, they perceived an opportunity to recreate the once-enormous, once-powerful Islamic empire, the Caliphate. To do that, they intended to create Islamist uprisings to overthrow Muslim governments allied with the United States. To demonstrate the weakness of those governments, they intended to show that the United States was both weak and hostile."

"September 11 was a superbly executed covert operation to strategically destabilize the United States. It could be carried out because of bin Laden’s deep understanding of how the CIA works, which he gained in Afghanistan. That put the United States in a position that required military retaliation, which was bin Laden’s goal. He wanted to give the United States a shot that it couldn’t ignore, because he wanted an American response."

"The US war in Afghanistan was arranged through key alliances: Russia provided bases in Central Asia and arranged for the US to 'rent' the Northern Alliance as its principal fighting force; Iran agreed to provide Shiite support in western Afghanistan. The Taliban was never defeated, but in most ways the first round went to the United States."

After Afghanistan
"Now there's another problem: There is a legitimate fear of nuclear attack on the US from a suitcase bomb. So what do you do? The US plan became to simultaneously attack Al Qaeda operatives throughout the world. But the US did not have the intelligence information to launch such strikes."

"To understand how Iraq comes up, you have to understand the desperation in the spring of 2002. All the good options are gone. You have to either stand and hope or do something else."

"The necessary intelligence about Al Qaeda exists, among the Pakistanis and the Saudis. Pakistan can be coerced into some cooperation, but Saudi Arabia cannot see cooperation as being in its best interests, among other reasons because it has seen the US back away from long-term engagements and Al Qaeda, which has shown its durability, has considerable support within Saudi Arabia. For the Saudis, backing the United States is backing a loser. It has to worry about Al Qaeda; it doesn’t have to worry about the US. Cooperation with the United States is too dangerous."

"So the center of gravity of the problem becomes getting the Saudis to cooperate with intelligence about Al Qaeda. In a more general sense, the US realizes that it must demonstrate more military resolve, that it must put Saudi Arabia into a strategic bind, and it must take control of the most strategic country in the region if it intends to fight a long-term war. That country, because of its borders and its air bases, is Iraq. If we take Iraq, we can own the region."

Explaining US Policy
"Here is where everything goes wrong. It’s hard to explain this policy; it’s hard to go on TV and say, 'We’re attempting to blackmail the Saudis.' So WMD was chosen as the explanation to give the American public. And in fact, everyone thought Saddam had WMD. Even Saddam thought he had WMD because he was being deceived by his scientists. He thought he had nukes."

"Further, the US did not anticipate Saddam’s follow-on war plan, which included full preparations for a guerrilla war, and the US did not – because of CIA failures compounded by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s intransigence – respond to that plan for three crucial months."

A Deal with Iran Made and Broken
"Since the US did not have enough forces to deal with the problem on the ground in Iraq, it turned to Iran, which had a lot of influence on Iraq’s Shiites. A deal was struck in which Iran kept the Shiites from rising up against the Sunnis and split them off from the jihadists. The US promised, 'In the end, we will leave you with a Shiite-dominated government.' For three years, that was our position: we were in alliance with Iran."

"And then, as the situation started to stabilize, the US 'double-crossed' Iran by backing Sunni demands in Fallujah and then by cutting a deal with Sunni elders to participate in the elections and distance themselves from the jihadists."

Iran and Nukes
"Becoming desperate as it saw its strategy of the past three years going down the drain, Iran decided it needed a strategy related to nuclear weapons for leverage against the US. Iran cannot accept a return to power of the Sunni former Baathists in Iraq, which is what the US is currently facilitating. Iran does not really seek nuclear weapons, and it knows it will not be permitted to get them, but it believes that going after them will assure American attention. Now the Iranians are pushing toward some unspecified line that would be a flash point for a crisis, trying to stay on the safe side of that line while waving their arms to convince the world they’re insane so the US will negotiate with them. The US does not want to attack Iran, so negotiations are likely."

"We could of course just give Iraq to the Iranians. What do we care who has Iraq? But the Saudis would go absolutely ballistic, because the Saudis are the mortal enemies of the Iranians."

"So it gets complicated and complicated. We want a compromise in Iraq; the Iranians want a compromise in Iraq. It’s tilted differently: we’re using as our nukes the Sunnis; they’re using as their nukes, nukes."

The US Politics of Iraq
"President Bush is unable to defend his complex strategy regarding Iraq in part because he started off with a simplistic explanation. The idea that we are fighting to bring democracy to Iraq, if by democracy you mean something like Minnesota, is kind of a whacked-out notion."

"In combination with his problems justifying his Iraq strategy, Bush almost lost his presidency after Katrina because his approval fell so low that it showed his own party was turning against him. An approval rating below 35% leads to a failed presidency. Although the President has recovered, he still faces significant challenges to his approval ratings on many fronts."

As Things Stand in Early 2006

• "Iraq is chaotic but contained: the malignant possibility of a complete breakdown into a total guerilla war against the US is gone."

• "Al Qaeda is a shattered organization: the intelligence for counteracting real terrorist threats is coming from Saudi Arabia."

• "Anti-Americanism does not translate into strategic terrorism. They hate us in the Islamic world . . . but terrorism is hard to do, and most of the trained ones are dead."

• "Iran is now a serious threat, but even the Iranian problem is containable."

• "Islam will be a problem, but not the central problem. The idea that our geopolitics will be defined ad infinitum by this 'clash of civilizations' is not true."

George Friedman, America's Domination in the 21st Century


George Friedman, Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 1


Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 2 (Video)
Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 3 (Video)
Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 4 (Video)
Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 5 (Video)
Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 6 (Video)
Interview from Avid Reader Brisbane - Part 7 (Video)

From Stratfor
The Next 100 Years Overture by George Friedman

Friedman on Geopolitics (Free Articles)

Burton and Stewart on Security (Free Articles)

Stratfor Video Center (Free)

FOCUS: The Sixties

"We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -- the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises - it is a set of challenges." - John F. Kennedy

"All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, 'Ich bin ein Berliner'." - John F Kennedy, speaking to the citizens of West Germany, June 26, 1963

"The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out." - Lance Morrow

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." - Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong, when taking
his first steps on the Moon, July 21, 1969

"It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...History is hard to know, because of all the tired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

"If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair." - Scott MacKenzie

"I still have trouble when I think about Chicago (68'). That week at the Convention changed everything I'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it... Everytime I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why...Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me. The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or revolution,' but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been. - Hunter S. Thompson

"He is the Willy Loman of Generation X, a traveling salesman who has the loyalty of a lizard with his tail broken off and the midnight taste of a man who'd double date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart." - Hunter S. Thompson, describing Bill Clinton in BBC News America

"For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part." - Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead

"The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great." - Abbie Hoffman

"People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas." - Bob Dylan

"The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens." - Camille Paglia

I Have a Dream, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


From FORA.tv
Don Lattin: The Harvard Psychedelic Club (Video)

From FORA.tv
Tom Brokaw, Boom! Voices of the Sixties (Video)

From FORA.tv
Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History (Video)

From Hillsdale College
Vietnam and the Rise of the New Left with Michael Medved (Video)

From The Commonwealth Club
On the Kennedy Years with David Talbot (Video)

From The Institute of Ideas
Radicalism Then and Now: The Legacy of 1968, Panel Discussion (Video)

From Grace Cathedral
Echoes of the 60s with Dr. Kathleen Frydl (Video)

From Hillsdale College
Lessons from the TET Offensive with Victor David Hanson (Video)

From C-SPAN
The Weather Underground with William Ayers and Don Strickland (Video)

ODDS & ENDS: Traveling, Ithaca, Dependency, Learning from Others, Getting Stated, Moving Along, Dreams, Colons, Simon Says, Rule of High School

Traveling
"I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train." - Tom Waits

"'Sherpa' means 'Easterner' in Tibetan; and the Sherpas who settled in Khambu about 450 years ago are a peace-loving Buddhist people from the Eastern shore of the plateau. They are also compulsive travelers; and in Sherpa-country every track is marked with cairns and prayer-flags, reminding you that Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot." - Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?

Ithaca
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road’s a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You won’t find them on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty and a fine
emotion touches your spirit.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you won’t encounter them,
unless you carry them within your soul.

Pray that the road is long.
May there be many a summer morning, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to discover new things and to learn from scholars.

Always keep (your home in) Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to finally arrive at the island when you are old,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, filled with so much experience,
you will finally understand what an Ithaca means.
- Constantine Cavafy

"Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is not aware." - Martin Buber

"Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the Cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, one feels once more Happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood. A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope – the three Sister Graces of our moral being.” - Sir Richard Burton

"My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of remembrance - and I wanted to go for the same reason." - John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley

"Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had." - James Hilton, Lost Horizon

"Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On'" - Tom Waits

On Dependency
"Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge." - Fritz Perls

On Learning from Others
"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry." - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

On Getting Started
"It's like making a movie: All sorts of accidental things will happen after you've set up the cameras. So you get lucky. Something will happen at the edge of the set and perhaps you start to go with that; you get some footage of that. You come into it accidentally. You set the story in motion, and as you're watching this thing begin, all these opportunities will show up." - Kurt
Vonnegut

On Moving Along
"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” - Anne Lamott

Sean Connery, A Narration of Ithaca


Randy Pausch, Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams


From Point Loma Nazarene University
An Evening with George Plimpton


From MiamiHerald.com
A Journey into My Colon . . . and Yours by Dave Barry

From the Daily Mail
A Letter to My Younger Self by Simon Cowell

From Seth Godin's Blog
The Rule of High School

FOCUS: The Universe

On the Known and Unknown Universe
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

"When the cartographers of the Middle Ages came to the end of the world as they knew it, they wrote: 'Beware: Dragons Lurk Beyond Here.'" - William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire

"The scientist, Roger Pemrose, was walking with some friends and talking animatedly. He fell silent only in order to cross the street. 'I remember that - as I was crossing the street - an incredible idea came to me,' Pemrose said. 'But, as soon as we reached the other side, we picked up where we left off, and I couldn't remember what I thought of just a few seconds earlier.' Late in the afternoon, Pemrose began to feel euphoric - without knowing why. 'I had the feeling that something had been revealed to me,' he said. He decided to go back over every minute of the day, and - when he remembered the moment when he was crossing the street - the idea came back to him. This time, he wrote it down. It was the theory of black holes, a revolutionary theory in modern physics. And it came back to him because Pemrose was able to recall the silence that we always fall into as we cross a street." - Paulo Coelho

"In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, Bell Lab scientists, were modifying a radio antenna so it could be used to receive signals from an early communications satellite. They tried to eliminate sources of background radio signals, but no matter what they did, they still heard residual static-like ‘noise.’ Their genius was to make the connection between the noise and new theories about big bang. They became the first people to hear the birth of the universe, winning Nobel prizes in the process." - Rick Harriman, Synectics Inc.

"A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 'However,' replied the universe, 'That fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'" - Stephen Crane

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy." - Albert Einstein

"I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." - Woody Allen

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rich Cook

"The wise man can pick up a grain of sand and envision a whole universe. But the stupid man will just lay down on some seaweed and roll around in it until he's completely draped in it. Then he'll stand up and go hey, I'm Vine Man." - Jack Handey

"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle." - Dave Barry

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of –
Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up along delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr., High Flight

The Known Universe



Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Pluto Files


From FORA TV
The Dance of the Universe: Are We Alone with Father George Coyne & Lynn Rothschild (Video)

From FORA TV
The Black Hole War with Leonard Susskind (Video)

From FORA TV
Death by Black Hole with Neil deGrasse Tyson (Video)

From FORA TV
Confessions of an Alien Hunter with Seth Shostak (Video)

From FORA TV
God and the Universe with Ian Morison (Video)

From The New York Times
Heaven and Nature by Russ Douthat

From NASA
Cosmology: The Study of the Universe (PDF)

MASTERMIND: Rick Warren

"I did a series of lectures for the faculty in the Kennedy School ... I started with this quote from Peter Drucker: 'The most significant sociological phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century was the rise of the corporation. The most significant sociological phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century has been the development of the large pastoral church - of the mega-church. It is the only organization that is actually working in our society.' Now Drucker has said that at least six times. I happen to know because he's my mentor. I've spent 20 years under his tutelage learning about leadership from him, and he's written it in two or three books, and he says he thinks it's [the mega-church] the only thing that really works in society." - Rick Warren

"A critical question for leaders is, 'When do you stop pouring resources into things that have achieved their purpose?' The most dangerous traps for a leader are those near-successes where everybody says that if you just give it another big push it will go over the top. One tries it once. One tries it twice. One tries it a third time. But, by then it should be obvious this will be very hard to do. So, I always advise my friend Rick Warren, 'Don't tell me what you're doing, Rick. Tell me what you stopped doing.'" - Peter Drucker, Forbes, November 19, 2004

"Lessons from business books never stick. Much better learning tools are novels, history books and biographies. For me, at least, these can really teach. Why? I suppose it's because when your imagination is engaged, when you dig the lessons out yourself and connect them to your own life, the learning goes much deeper. With that said, I give you the best book on entrepreneurship, business and investment that I've read in some time. It's not new and it's not a business book. It was written in 1995 and comes from the field of religion. It's titled The Purpose-Driven Church and was penned by Rick Warren. Warren - in 1980 and from scratch - launched Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif. Under his leadership, the church has become the fastest-growing one in America. Weekends bring in an average of 15,000 worshipers. Saddleback has spawned dozens of so-called daughter churches throughout the country. Were it a business, Saddleback would be compared with Dell, Google or Starbucks. The Purpose-Driven Church has sold more than 1 million copies. Its sequel, The Purpose-Driven Life, has sold 12 million copies. Whatever you think about Warren or his religious beliefs, he has discerned a consumer need out there." - Rich Karlgaard, publisher, Forbes Magazine (Read the rest of the article here.)


Rick Warren, Big Think Interview
How Do You Organize a Mega-Church?


What Is a Purpose Driven Life?


Other Questions from the Big Think Interview (Video)

From TED
Rick Warren, A Life of Purpose (Video)

From The New Yorker
The Cellular Church: How Rick Warren Built His Ministry by Malcolm Gladwell

FOCUS: Great Questions

Some Thoughts on Questions
"A very powerful question may not have an answer at the moment it is asked. It will sit rattling in the mind for days or weeks as the person works on an answer. If the seed is planted, the answer will grow. Questions are alive." - Fran Peavey

"The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions." - Anthony Jay

"The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask." – Thomas Kuhn

"The first people had questions and they were free. The second people had answers and they became enslaved." - Wind Eagle, Native American Chief

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein

"I'm much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions." - Tim Brown, IDEO CEO, The New York Times

"If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?" - Scott Adams

Some Questions
“Customer satisfaction is best measured by one simple question, 'How likely are you to recommend ____ to a friend?' - Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company

"If you weren't already in a business, would you enter it today? And if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?" - Peter Drucker to Jack Welch, 1981

"Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?" - Steve Jobs

"Would you want your wife to pee in this place?” - Paco Underhill, Why We Buy

“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'" - Douglas Adams

Scanning the Periphery
From a Masters Forum Presentation, Roch Parayre, DSI

• What have been our past blind spots?
• What is happening there now?
• Is there an instructive analogy from another industry?
• Who in your industry is skilled at picking up weak signals and acting on them ahead of competition?
• What important signals are you rationalizing away?
• What are your mavericks and authors saying?
• What are peripheral customers and competitors really thinking?
• What future surprises could hurt or help us?
• What emerging technologies could change the game?
• Is there an unthinkable scenario?
  

Questions of the Year
From TED Global 2009 by Chris Anderson

• What is an accomplished life?
• Which universe do we live in?
• Is life a mathematical equation?
• Where does motivation come from?
• Who's defining the new geopolitical map?
• How can we observe what we can't see?
• Can we design the air we breathe?
• What's the economic impact of terrorism?
• Should we fear faith?
• What makes big cities function?
• What do top-secret places look like?
• What's the true nature of modern crime?
• Can a solar-powered plane fly?
• What's the power of music?
• Can we put biodiversity in a bank?
• How does the brain create the mind?

Who Are We . . . Really?
From No Easy Victories by John Gardner

• What things are forgotten in the heat of battle?
• What values get pushed aside in the rough-and-tumble of everyday living?
• What are the goals we ought to be thinking about and never do?
• What are the facts we don’t like to face?
• What are the questions we lack the courage to ask?

Jack Welch, Q & A with Alex D'Arbeloff


From the Harvard Business School
Scanning for Threats and Opportunities by George S. Day & Paul J.H. Schoemaker

From Knowledge@Wharton
Vigilant vs. Operational Leaders (PDF)

From Bowling Green State University
A Lifetime List of Dialogue Questions by Walter Maner

ODDS & ENDS: Gifts, Country Music, Language

On Gifts
"Johnny Cash sang like he meant business. He didn't get fancy and he didn't send his voice on missions it could not complete, but there was an urgency in his best songs that pounded them home. When he sang something, it stayed sung." - Roger Ebert

On Country Music
"Country music is three chords and the truth." - Harlan Howard

"Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy." - Dierks Bentley

"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music." - Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize lecture, December, 1993

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means put down." - Bob Newhart

"Country songs have always told the best stories and no one - really, no one - has ever done it better than Nashville. All my life I've admired guitarists like Chet Atkins and Roy Clark who touched me through their sound, but it was those Nashville songwriters who got to me through their words." - B.B. King, blues guitarist and singer-songwriter

On Language
"Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." - Noam Chomsky

"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - Wade Davis, speaking at The Long Now Foundation

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." – Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

"And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute." – John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love

"Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought." - Karl Kraus

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." - Nietzsche

Johnny Cash, The Man in Black


From Academy of Achievement
Music's Man In Black: An Interview with Johnny Cash

From FORA.tv
A.C. Grayling & Don Watson, It's All Gone to the Dogs - Video

From FORA.tv
Roy Blount Jr., The Sounds, Roots, and History of Words - Video

From YouTube
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Video

MASTERMIND: Thomas Sowell

"Much of the self-righteous nonsense that abounds on so many subjects cannot stand up to three questions: 1) Compared to what? 2) At what cost? and 3) What are the hard facts?" - Thomas Sowell

"One of the great meaningless phrases of our times is: 'I take full responsibility.' This does not mean that you are prepared to pay the consequences for what you have done. On the contrary, this statement is usually offered instead of taking the consequences." - Thomas Sowell

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good." - Thomas Sowell

"No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results." - Thomas Sowell

"Not only does the passage of time produce knowledge, it also produces ignorance. As the passage of time removes people with first-hand knowledge of an earlier era, they are replaced by people ignorant of those times and therefore easy targets for demagogues." - Thomas Sowell

"Nearly two hundred years ago, the great economist David Ricardo said: 'I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.'" - Thomas Sowell

"Some people are so busy being clever that they don't have time enough to be wise." - Thomas Sowell

"Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty." - Thomas Sowell

"Perhaps the scariest aspect of our times is how many people think in talking points, rather than in terms of real world consequences." - Thomas Sowell

"In this era of political correctness, some people seem unaware that being squeamish about words can mean being blind to realities." - Thomas Sowell

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling." - Thomas Sowell

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." - Thomas Sowell

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell

"One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." - Thomas Sowell

"There was once a time when parents pointed out bums on the streets and told their children that this was what could happen to you if you didn't bother to learn the things you needed to know, and do the things you needed to do, to make it in life. Today, children are taught to be 'non-judgmental' and the media keep saying that these drug-ridden derelicts are 'people just like us' who happened to fall on hard times." - Thomas Sowell

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long." - Thomas Sowell

"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them." - Thomas Sowell

"If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win." - Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals & Society: Part One - Introduction


Intellectuals and Society: Part Two - Economics (Video)
Intellectuals and Society: Part Three - Vision (Video)
Intellectuals and Society: Part Four - War (Video)
Intellectuals and Society: Part Five - The Rest of Us (Video)

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions


From the Jewish World Review
Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell (Column)
Intellectuals and Society: Part II by Thomas Sowell (Column)

From The Orange County Register
Thomas Sowell Dissects Intellectuals by Mark Landsbaum (Editorial)

ODDS & ENDS: Beliefs, History Lessons, Gettysburg Address, Conflict, Overcoming Disappointment

Beliefs and Credos
"I am a singer and a songwriter, but I am also a father - four times over. I am a friend to dogs. I am a sworn enemy of the saccharine, and a believer in grace over karma. I talk too much when I'm drunk and sometimes even when I'm not." - Bono, lead singer, U2

"There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?" - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses." - Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge,
That myth is more potent than history,
That dreams are more powerful than facts,
That hope always triumphs over experience,
That laughter is the only cure for grief,
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
- Robert Fulghum, The Storyteller's Creed

"What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do." - James Carville

“Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing. Nevertheless, they give up their life to that little or nothing. Our life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it and then it is gone. But to surrender what you are…and live without belief…that’s more terrible than dying…more terrible than dying young.” - Maxwell Anderson, Joan of Lorraine

History Lessons
"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles A. Beard, All the Lessons of History in Four Sentences

"Our generation is realistic for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who has invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who has entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or Shema Yisrael on his lips." - Victor Frankl

"History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it." - John Buchan

"If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On The Gettysburg Address
"Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?" - Robert Coles

"The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." - Chicago Times, commenting on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address the next day

Robert Coles: Children Consider Human Conflict



From FORA.tv
Rabbi Harold Kushner, Overcoming Life's Disappointments (Video)


From Scott London
A Way of Seeing: The Work of Robert Coles (Essay)

From Google Books
The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles

FOCUS: Education

"But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know." - J.R.R. Tolkien

"I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing." - Neil Gaiman


"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you are standing there, you are going to end up with an earful of cider." - Damon Runyon

"A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep." - John Ciardi, Ciardi Himself

"I want to give you a yardstick, a gold standard, by which to measure good schooling. The Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine, will teach you how to build a three thousand square-foot, multi-level Cape Cod home in three weeks’ time, whatever your age. If you stay another week, it will show you how to make your own posts and beams; you’ll actually cut them out and set them up. You’ll learn wiring, plumbing, insulation, the works. Twenty thousand people have learned to build a house there for about the cost of one month’s tuition in public school." - John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher

"Education either functions 1) as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or 2) it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." - Paulo Freire

"The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life - by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort." - Ayn Rand

"If we make money the object of man training, we shall develop money makers but not necessarily men; if we make technical skill the object of education, we may possess artisans but not, in nature, men. Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools - intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it - this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life." - W.E.B. Du Bois

"What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities." – Buckminster Fuller

"In a completely rational society, teachers would be at the top of the pyramid, not near the bottom. In that society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. The job of passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor anyone could have." - Lee Iacocca, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Bill Strickland, Changing the World with a Slide Show


Sir Ken Robinson, Changing Paradigms


Sir Ken Robinson, The Element

Peter Yarrow, A Tribute to the Teachers of America (Interview with Mark Malaro)

QUICK TAKE: On Learning

Bring on the Learning Revolution
Sir Ken Robinson

MASTERMIND: Alain de Botton

"The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread. It has provided psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"In medieval Japan, poets and priests directed the Japanese toward cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood. A word emerged, wabi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things. There was wabi to be enjoyed in an evening spent alone in a cottage in the woods hearing the rain fall." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion – and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium. Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not." - Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

"Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too." - Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

"All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance." - Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"What makes the prospect of death so distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours." - Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love

Alain de Botton, Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love


Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love - Part 2 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love - Part 3 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Neitzsche on Hardship - Part 1 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Neitzsche on Hardship - Part 2 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Neitzsche on Hardship - Part 3 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Socrates on Self-Confidence - Part 1 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Socrates on Self-Confidence - Part 2 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Socrates on Self-Confidence - Part 3 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Epicurus on Happiness - Part 1 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Epicurus on Happiness - Part 2 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Epicurus on Happiness - Part 3 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Montaigne on Self-Esteem - Part 1 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Montaigne on Self-Esteem - Part 2 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Montaigne on Self-Esteem - Part 3 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Seneca on Anger - Part 1 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Seneca on Anger - Part 2 of 3 (Video)

Philosophy: Seneca on Anger - Part 3 of 3 (Video)

From TED 2009
A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success by Alain de Botton (Video)

From FORA.tv
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (Video)

From City Journal
The Consolations of Pessimism by Alain de Botton (Essay)

From The Atlantic
The Status-tician by Adam Baer (Interview with Alain de Botton)

From The Guardian
On The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Lynn Barber (Interview with Alain de Botton)

From The Independent
Philosopher King by Katy Guest (Interview with Alain de Botton)