Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?
If you're a psychologist, you can instrumentally change peoples lives for the better. But you can only do that for about 300 people to maybe a thousand people - if you're really prolific and you're working really hard.
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
The whole climate change debate gives - and there are all kinds of quotes from adherents of and promoters of climate change - the reason they're doing it is it's such a great opportunity to control, you know, pretty much, government, and control your lives.
Being ready isn't enough; you have to be prepared for a promotion or any other significant change.
The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.
I've seen the harshest of reggae purists come give me my props because I've been at it for so long... They've seen me come from the hardest of hard-core dancehall to where I am, and they've heard my music change through the years. Some might not agree, but they respect.
It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn't have prosecuted the war. We shouldn't have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives.
We tell prospective hires, 'If you want an environment that is never going to change, don't come here. This is not the place for you.'
I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.
I have two prosthetic legs. This is my life; what am I going to do with it? And it's put me on this amazing journey. I can look back and be completely grateful and say I would never want to change anything.
I thought for a very long time that I had to conform or maybe change the way I look, or maybe the hijab was dimming my beauty. I took a moment, and then I realized, you know what, there's a lot of girls who do wear this, and this is their reality. It just made me even more prouder to wear it.
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
A lot of people ask: 'Will you play a psycho to really change your image and prove you can act?' But that's not what I'm about.
Public discourse about climate change has resulted in the erroneous idea that it's all about cost, burden and sacrifice. If the math was correct, everyone would see it's about profit, jobs and competitive advantage.
The left has total control over the public education system, all the way up to the university level. It's something they own, and it's going to have to change.
Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth's systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways.
Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree.
I think the rules are going to have to change for me to ever run for public office. My checkered past will always keep me out of politics.
