Amartya Sen on Intolerance, Harsh Mander, Alicia Keys, and more

The problem is not that Indians have turned intolerant. In fact, quite the contrary. We have been too tolerant even of intolerance.

Amaryta Sen, Nobel laureate in economics, at the annual Rajendra Mathur Memorial Lecture

I’ve listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about their close friends, and [there are] three expectations of a close friend that I hear people describing and valuing across the entire life course: somebody to talk to, someone to depend on, and someone to enjoy. These expectations remain the same, but the circumstances under which they’re accomplished change.

William Rawlins, PhD, professor of communications, in The Atlantic

Take every minute, one at a time. Don’t be fooled by a perfect sea at any given moment. Accept and rise to whatever circumstance presents itself.

Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, in her memoir Find a Way

Recently, a man decided to make a sandwich from scratch. He grew the vegetables, gathered salt from seawater, milked a cow ... [It] cost him six months of his life and set him back $1,500 … The inefficiency of making even something as humble as a sandwich by oneself, without the benefits of market exchange, is simply mind-boggling. There was a time when everyone grew their own food and made their own clothes. It was a time of unimaginable poverty and labour without rest.

Chelsea German, researcher, in The Wall Street Journal

Economists who study happiness have begun to entertain the notion that perhaps what matters isn’t the degree to which people get what they want but how much they like what they get. Good emotions may be more important than satiation of desires.

Noah Smith, PhD, economist, in Bloomberg View

... A country is infinitely poorer if its young people are prevented from their free right to dream and dissent, because throughout history and across the planet, the journey of creating a more just and humane world has begun always with the dreams and also the challenges and disagreements of its young people.

Harsh Mander, social worker and writer, on scroll.in

Every once in a while at the end [of a movie in a movie theatre], we do something really remarkable: we applaud. We don’t applaud at our televisions. We don’t applaud at our iPhones. We don’t applaud at our iPads. But after a great movie, we applaud. That’s the power of the moviegoing experience. Today, we may live in an era in which we can own any movie we wish. But in the theatre, movies own us.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation movie studio, in a speech

With a song, you can’t explain exactly what happens or when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to do to you or somebody else. But somehow, it’s this beautiful conduit that connects everybody in a way nothing else can.

Alicia Keys, singer and songwriter, in Marie Claire

The greatest feeling an adult can experience is seeing a back-to-school commercial and knowing it no longer affects your life.

@DamienFahey, television writer