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“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand

It’s strange how popular the saying What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger is, when it’s obvious that it is not what hits you that makes you stronger, but the way you take the hit.

Every experience we live teaches us something about the world and God. These lessons are always perfectible. From the pain of other people, however, we learn the wrong lessons so easily.

I open the window and breathe in the air, trying to guess the weather. Floating around, mixed, are scents and miasms alike; it's hard to decipher these intricate clues.

Whether we see ourselves or not as living collections of our habits, we know from experience that, once formed, our habits are not as malleable as we would like them to be.

When it comes to purchasing food, price often guides our decision-making. We tend to believe that anything more expensive is also of higher quality. This perception can be true, but only to a certain extent.

“When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window,” poet Ogden Nash once said, encapsulating one of the most common sources of intergenerational conflict—the role grandparents play in the upbringing of their grandchildren.

In 2016, I noticed advertising for a new quiz show called Hard Quiz coming to ABC TV in Australia.

Right at the start of the political thriller, The Post, a scene portrays military analyst Daniel Ellsberg with an empty gaze and a soul burdened by the horrors of the Vietnam war he was forced to document for the United States Department of Defense.

Raising a child is not easy at all. Raising someone else’s child is even harder. But raising six children who are not your own, giving up your life, sounds crazy to most of us.

“Mister Watson, come here, I want to see you.” With this message, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, launched the telephone. The door had opened to distant, personal and instant contact.

Romantic love is easily hurt and somewhat pretentious, especially when faced with direct honesty. Friendship is more solid.

A smooth sea never gave a skilled sailor, said Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that without hardship, challenges and even failures, we cannot become our best selves.

In an ideal world, everything would be simple: you, as the father or mother, tell your child, the apple of your eye, to do something and, being perfectly obedient and submissive, they do as they’re told. However, we don’t know if such a world would really be ideal. Nevertheless, for many parents, this resembles a paradise to which they would love to escape...

Daily stress is a good excuse to avoid other people's needs, but this choice is a double loss. The kindness we display to make other people's days better is a very strong antidote to the high level of stress we experience daily.