Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment.
Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn't mean you can't grow into something else.
There's always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck, but that doesn't mean there isn't a choice.
Whenever you've got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn't always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.
The human mind isn't a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn't make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.
Growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.
There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don't let anyone tell you any different.
I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
I don't feel like I possess a particular political intelligence, and when I read work that does, I feel like somebody else is going to have the right political thing to say. As a citizen, I feel an enormous need to respond, and immediately post-election, I felt like, What is my work worth? Should I quit what I'm doing and go work on the 2018 election now? How is what I'm putting into the world meaningful?
Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.
Influenced by him, and probably even more so by my brother Theodore a year older than me, I soon became interested in biology and developed a respect for the importance of science and the scientific method.