Things to Do Before You Die: Skydive, Visit Rome, Rob Bank

Because it was something I had on my “bucket list.” I think everyone should have a list of things they want to do before they expire.

— Patricia Edwards explaining why she robbed a bank(!) in Deland, Florida.

When people speak of their low self-esteem, they imply two things: first, that it is a physiological fact, rather like low hemoglobin, and second, that they have a right to more of it . . . . For the record, I never had a patient who complained of having too much self-esteem, and who therefore asked for a reduction. Self-esteem, it appears, is like money or health: you can’t have too much of it.

— Theodore Dalrymple on the self-esteemists.

A colleague of mine observes that the average American man is about 2 inches taller than a hundred years ago. But you’d never learn that from a survey that asks people “Are you tall?”. That’s because a 5?9? man would probably have answered “yes” a hundred years ago and “no” today. And likewise, people might be far happier today than a hundred years ago, but you’d never learn that from a survey that asks “Are you happy?”

—Economist Steve Landsburg on the problem with self-reported happiness surveys.

Brevity may be the soul of wit, or lingerie, or texting, or quail eggs, but all subjects are not the same. Efficiency of expression is in some realms a virtue and in some realms a vice. Brevity is certainly not the soul of news, if by news you mean more than information. “The point” is not always easy. There is not always a “takeaway.”

— Leon Wieseltier on news in our “abbreviating age.”

The peril in conferring on this behaviour the idea of rights, as the philosopher Roger Scruton has argued, is the vacuity of a right whose recipient has no way of acknowledging it and no intention of granting it to others. Even the nicest whale disregards the rights of plankton. We seem content that our pet cat should torture birds and mice to death.

That such an argument leads up an ethical blind alley does not lessen its appeal to public emotion. Scruton, for all his enthusiasm for hunting, has sympathy for the view of the theologian Andrew Linzey, in his Why Animal Suffering Matters. Scruton points out that our concern should be not so much for the supposed rights of animals but for the vices of humans. The principle of not doing unnecessary harm “does not involve extending to animals the privileges and protections that are the gift of moral agency”. It derives from our aversion to the human vice of enjoying suffering for its own sake.

— Simon Jenkins on animal rights.

Additional sources: Gawker , The Browser