‘Asking questions is what brains were born to do, at least when we were young children. For young children, quite literally, seeking explanations is as deeply rooted a drive as seeking food or water.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There’s a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘What we want in students is creativity and a willingness to fail. I always say to students, ‘If you’ve never at some point stayed up all night talking to your new boyfriend about the meaning of life instead of preparing for the test, then you’re not really an intellectual.” – Alison Gopnik

‘We fear death so profoundly, not because it means the end of our body, but because it means the end of our consciousness – better to be a spirit in Heaven than a zombie on Earth.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘One of the things I say is, ‘You want to know what it’s like to be a baby? It’s like being in love for the first time in Paris after four double espressos.’ And boy, you are alive and conscious.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It’s not a blank slate, but it isn’t written in stone, either.’ – Alison Gopnik

‘One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.’ – Alison Gopnik