Intelligence complicates. Wisdom simplifies.
We want to obviously foster a relationship that we're a partner with states; that we all share the same goals of closing the achievement gap, just as the Congress does; and that we're practical and sophisticated enough to understand what they're talking about.
Only small minds are impressed by large numbers.
It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.
Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.
I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.
Close friends, or those in my pay, sometimes call me a literary polymath, while others say that I'm just a shallow dilettante, superficial and breezy, with a faux-naif style.
there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.
We are used to dealing with problems that have a solution and that can be solved in a finite period. But we're at the beginning of a long period of adjustment that does not have a clear-cut terminal point, and in which our wisdom and sophistication and understanding has to be one of the key elements.
