Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes.

the printing press helped democratise Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, often before the state had fully democratised.

You come back and go to a job where your boss is trying to make an extra buck and your co-workers are trying to trample each other to get ahead- even though you just came back from a place where people were willing to die for you.

The antithesis of high performance is micromanagement—dictating every aspect of a task. This approach essentially communicates, 'Leave the thinking to me. Just follow orders, and maybe you'll advance.' It stifles creativity and initiative.

I use the word repugnance to describe transactions that some people would like to engage in, that other people would not like them to; it's often hard to pin-down what harm the transaction does to anyone else.