"So, she says, "No, Brian, it's I before E, EXCEPT after C, AND when sounding like A, as in neighbor, and weigh, and on weekends, and holidays, and all throughout May, and you'll always be wrong NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY!" |teacher"

"Apparently! |Brain"

""What are you, an idiot, Brian?" |teacher"

"Um... I before E... ALWAYS. |Brian"

"The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable."

"I’m a firm believer in shades of gray."

"Most things that we and the people around us do constantly... have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing – and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry."

"Some people undoubtedly find it convenient to have students arrive having already been stamped PRIME, CHOICE, SELECT, or STANDARD."

"Punishment and reward proceed from basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior."

"Very few things are as dangerous as a bunch of incentive-driven individuals trying to play it safe."

"Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naïve and is dismissed."

"The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior. When our primary focus is on discrete behaviors, we end up ignoring the whole child."

"Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions"

"It doesn't matter how motivated students are; what matters is how students are motivated"

"The real alternative to being Number One is not being Number Two; it is dispensing with rankings altogether"

"The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior."

"Nothing about the concept of positive interdependence requires that members of the group avoid conflict, and there are good data to suggest that they should not do so."

"Rewards and punishments are not opposites at all; they are two sides of the same coin. And it is a coin that does not buy very much."