Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.
Interpretation
Intelligence provides various advantages in life, including better health and financial stability.
This quote by Steven Pinker emphasizes the multifaceted benefits of intelligence throughout an individual's life. It suggests that being smarter not only leads to higher earnings and longer life expectancy but also to healthier relationships and better outcomes for future generations, highlighting the profound impact of intelligence on personal and societal well-being.
In practice
This quote can be used in a graduation speech to encourage students to value their education.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
The desire to know is natural to good men.
I write to save someone's life, probably my own
Here lies the secret. Says Patanjali, the father of Yoga, "When a man rejects all the superhuman powers, then he attains to the cloud of virtue." He sees God. He becomes God and helps others to become the same. This is all I have to preach. Doctrines have been expounded enough. There are books by the million. Oh, for an ounce of practice!
Some critics are stimulating in that they make you realise how you could do better, and those are valued.
Good morning, daddy! Ain't you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred? • • • • You think It's a happy beat?
I soon discovered that man's importunity is God's opportunity. he uses our problems as building materials for his miracles. I began to understand that this was my first lesson in learning to trust him completely, my first steps on the path to complete dependence on, and obedience to, his guidance.
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