Date: September 2, 2011
"The 'will' in willpower is not some mysterious 'free will,' a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself."
preview | full record— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)
Date: September 2, 2011
"The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will."
preview | full record— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)
Date: March 11, 2011
"The huge submerged bulk of the mental iceberg, with its stores of memory and acquired skills that have become automatic, like language, driving and etiquette, supplies people with the raw materials on which they can exercise their reason and decide what to think and what to do."
preview | full record— Nagel, Thomas (b. 1937)
Date: March 9, 2012
"If we acquire a bad habit this way it is very hard to change, because its grooves are so well worn in our minds."
preview | full record— Wilson, Timothy D.
Date: June 2, 2015
"Padding for the mental life, so to speak."
preview | full record— Parker, James
Date: January 12, 2017
"It opened a door in my mind, and behind that door I found the room where I wanted to spend the rest of my life."
preview | full record— Auster, Paul (b. February 3, 1947)
Date: January 8, 2019
"When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked t...
preview | full record— Morton, Brian (b. July 8, 1955)