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Optimism and hope provide choices. The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.

Our feelings are raw, unadulterated truth, but until we understand why we are happy or angry or anxious, the truth is useless to us.

…if there is anything that undermines trust, it is the feeling that the people at the top lack integrity, are without a solid sense of ethics.

…decades of experimental research have found… when people vent their feelings aggressively, they often feel worse, pump up their blood pressure, and make themselves even angrier.

…our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.

Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group.

Because we are not irrational or mean-spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s the other groups’ negative feelings we need to suppress.

Without feeling attached to groups that give our lives meaning, identity, and purpose, we would suffer the intolerable sensation that we were loose marbles rattling around in a random universe.

By persuading ourselves that they are unworthy… we avoid feeling guilty or unethical about how we treat them.

…when we learn that a memory is wrong, we feel stunned, disoriented, as if the ground under us has shifted. It has made us rethink our own role in the story.