Suppose you like someone very much. Then, by a familiar halo effect, you will also be prone to believe many good things about that person - you will be biased in their favor. Most of us like ourselves very much, and that suffices to explain self-assessments that are biased in a particular direction.
Unending joy is actually closer to us than our own skin, and there is nothing we have to do or get or be to experience it. All we have to do is stop driving it away.
President Obama's election has taught us to stop being paralyzed by excuses and given us a floodgate of hope. I'm more daring and going after things that I once thought were not possible.
I definitely have the eye of the tiger. I've fought my way to where I am and will continue to do so. I'm a hard worker - I get it from my family. We only know work. Nothing was handed to us. When I believe in something, I go after it. It's very hard to tell me 'no.'
It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion.
Each one of us can do a good deed, every day and everywhere. In hospitals in desperate need of volunteers, in homes for the elderly where our parents and grandparents are longing for a smile, a listening ear, in the street, in our workplaces and especially at home.
My parents pushed us very hard to work, both in the home, doing chores and cooking, and at school.
And the truth is, those who are terrorists only have to succeed once, and those of us who are trying to build an inclusive society have to succeed every time.
People forget the punk thing was really good for women. It motivated them to pick up a guitar rather than be a chanteuse. It allowed us to be aggressive.
We are, after all, a nation of laws. And we live in a culture where carrying a form of identification is as normal as keeping your car keys in your pocket. When any of us walk into a grocery store and cashes a check, no one skips a beat when asked to present our driver's license.
The way we approached Meru, and the way we approach a lot of these mountains, is with humility. A sense of, 'Is it going to give us passage?' Your mental attitude can affect the outcome.
Living big and joyful and content is almost always the result of our finding satisfaction in life's ordinary day-to-day pleasures. And God must be fond of them, too, for He made so many of them for us to enjoy.
Just as God's love to us believers, his children, is unalterably the same, whatever may be the manifestations of that love; and as his peace with us is the same, however much our peace may be disturbed; so it is also with regard to our being in fellowship or partnership with him: it remains unalterably the same so far as God is concerned.
We must not condemn to frustration those whose job it is to protect us by failing to provide them with the necessary resources to meet the threats they face.
Like most of us, Joe Biden has had moments when he's led the league in mistakes or verbal gaffes. The difference is his were on a public stage where explanations are almost always made out by pundits to be excuses.
The directories businesses still make nothing but money. They're overleveraged, they're bankrupt entities, but they still are the largest. This is all going to move online over time. Why Citysearch and Service Magic are so important to us, is because nobody has really colonized it yet completely.
All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.
The good thing is that women have such high expectations of men that it inspires us to live up to them. That's what I learned about male-female relationships.
I was born late - what my mother calls the last kick of a dying horse. There's three of us children, but I'm 13 or 14 years younger than my brother and sister.
That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the Right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the Right comes around, too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.
When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.
The jobs crisis has reached a boiling point, which is why we see Occupy Wall Street protestors crying out for an America that lets all of us reach for the American Dream again - a dream that says if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a good life and retire with dignity.
I went to Alaska as a young man just looking for adventure. And like so many of us in the '70s, we found it.
'Out of many, one' is the national motto, and what the Founders imagined it meant is that out of the great and celebrated differences between us comes one nation and one larger purpose.
Marriage is an institution that existed before governments existed. It's something that reflects nature and reflects God and God's will for us. And both from the standpoint of faith and reason it makes all the sense in the world. And it's beneficial for society.
I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.
I want to thank the American people - on both sides of the aisle - for years of financial, diplomatic, and military support, and for helping us carry the burden of defense.
I was one of the first people in the Palestinian world, in the late 1970s, to say that there is no military option, either for us or for them, and I'm certainly the only well-known Arab who writes these things - and who writes exactly the same things in the Arab press that I say here.
And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message. You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan.
Life doesn't always give us what we are expecting.
There's something really interesting about having those close friends that you've had incredible times with but growing up and away from them. The underlying tensions, the shifting in the group dynamic, the little lies you tell to big yourself up: it's something that happens to us all.
Often I feel that projects overwhelm us when we look at how many hours are involved until completion. But just getting started is usually not that difficult.
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
Why don't we face up to the fact that many of us in Silicon Valley are living lives that involve telling ourselves a lot of lies.
No man wants to accept they could be getting used for money. But it's OK for them to let us know that they use us?
The key to creating the mental space before responding is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way of being present: paying attention to and accepting what is happening in our lives. It helps us to be aware of and step away from our automatic and habitual reactions to our everyday experiences.
