Michael Y. Simon

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
― Carl Bernstein

“Whatever emotional state you’re in while you’re parenting conveys more to your child than the content of what you're doing with them, no matter how perfect your intervention looks "on paper." In other words, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, "your emotional state is the message.”
― Michael Y. Simon, The Approximate Parent: Discovering the Strategies that Work for Your Teenager

“The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.”
― George F. Kennan