32 Quotes by Amanda Ripley

People will help each other because there is a sense of camaraderie that springs up, which is a survival tactic. You help them because you know you might need their help later. And that is incredibly reassuring.

Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.

Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc – where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme.

We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect.

My anxiety about disasters is lower. The more you know, the less scary any of this stuff is. And that’s my hope for the book. I want to get people’s attention and tell them very valuable and ultimately hopeful information, and you find out nothing is as scary as your imagination.

The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it’s not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.

Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country – every one – still had work to do.

A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism.

We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.