“We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of ...” — Stephen J. Dubner Quote

We've been conditioned to think that quitting is a failure, a form of failure. How do we know that that's true?

'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.

Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.

I believe that people generally want to be what we call good. They want to cooperate with people. They don't want to steal; they don't want to cheat. But everybody has a price. Everybody has an incentive.

Fans, wrestlers, and even the general public have been conditioned to believe that there's an enormous skill gap between WWE and everyone else.

I think men and women are the same. Even as parents, I think we're the same. We're just conditioned to think that we're different. Having said that, it's true that motherhood is a particularly vulnerable area. It's an open wound, really. A woman is exposed to being turned into a different kind of person by the experience of motherhood.

The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.

I would like my kids to go to college and be exposed to the real world and to make their own decisions and find their own path instead of sending them somewhere where they would be creatively conditioned for one life path or another.