Top 40 Amanda Ripley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a believe that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.”

— Amanda Ripley

2. “We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect.”

— Amanda Ripley

3. “Success,” as Winston Churchill once said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

— Amanda Ripley

4. “Narrative is the beginning of recovery.”

— Amanda Ripley

5. “The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it’s not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.”

— Amanda Ripley

6. “Citizens are not prepared for attacks because there is a bias against the public by nearly every expert and government official. In emergency preparedness, there is this belief that public will panic, that the public is not to be trusted, that there will be looting.”

— Amanda Ripley

7. “Most of us do not feel heard much of the time. That’s because most people don’t know how to listen. We jump to conclusions. We think we understand when we don’t. We tee up our next point, before the other person has finished talking.”

— Amanda Ripley

8. “People will help each other because there is a sense of camaraderie that springs up, which is a survival tactic. You help them because you know you might need their help later. And that is incredibly reassuring.”

— Amanda Ripley

9. “Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc – where almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme.”

— Amanda Ripley

10. “Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.”

— Amanda Ripley

11. “A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism.”

— Amanda Ripley

12. “Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country – every one – still had work to do.”

— Amanda Ripley

13. “Whether they are at an airline or at a command center, experts will err on the side of excluding the public, as we have seen. If they can avoid enrolling regular people in their emergency plans, they will. Life is easier that way, until something goes wrong.”

— Amanda Ripley

14. “This strange new test called PISA, which stood for the Program for International Student Assessment. Instead of a typical test question, which might ask which combination of coins you needed to buy something, PISA asked you to design your own coins, right there in the test booklet.”

— Amanda Ripley

15. “If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.”

— Amanda Ripley

16. “Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: ‘Fires only happen to other people.’ We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before.”

— Amanda Ripley

17. “The health of your family or your office or your city directly affects the health of it after. The better you are at handling high-stress situations with little information, those skills lead to resilience and the ability to recover afterward.”

— Amanda Ripley

18. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been with very smart, knowledgeable Homeland Security experts who are essentially tasked with saving your life who do not trust you with information. They just don’t. They kind of dismiss the media and the public in one fell swoop.”

— Amanda Ripley

19. “Finally, it was clear that the real innovation in Korea was not happening in the government or the public schools. It was happening in Korea’s shadow education system – the multimillion-dollar afterschool tutoring complex that Lee was trying to undermine. I realized that, if I wanted to see what a truly free-market education system looked like, I would have.”

— Amanda Ripley

20. “Tom was not good at math. He’d started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn’t understood one lesson, and then another and another.”

— Amanda Ripley

21. “Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.”

— Amanda Ripley

22. “In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom’s class in Poland, calculators weren’t allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.”

— Amanda Ripley

23. “Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something was very different about how math was taught in Korea. Something that not even Minnesota had figured out.”

— Amanda Ripley

24. “My anxiety about disasters is lower. The more you know, the less scary any of this stuff is. And that’s my hope for the book. I want to get people’s attention and tell them very valuable and ultimately hopeful information, and you find out nothing is as scary as your imagination.”

— Amanda Ripley

25. “Suffering accumulates, like debt.”

— Amanda Ripley

26. “Most serious plane crashes are survivable. There’s a sense that, ‘Oh, if we go down, that’s it, it’s out of my hands.’ And that’s just statistically not true. I have more optimism and more faith that my own actions can make a difference.”

— Amanda Ripley

27. “We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.”

— Amanda Ripley

28. “The Iron Child culture was contagious; it was hard for kids and parents to resist the pressure to study more and more. But all the while, they complained that the fixation on rankings and test scores was crushing their spirit, depriving them not just of sleep but of sanity.”

— Amanda Ripley

29. “Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world.”

— Amanda Ripley

30. “Understanding people doesn’t change them. It’s not nearly enough. But almost no one changes until they feel heard. That’s the third paradox of conflict. People need to believe you understand them, even as they realize you disagree, before they will hear you.”

— Amanda Ripley

31. “There are lots of ways to rehumanize people, but one way is through great storytelling. It can be more powerful than any peace treaty.”

— Amanda Ripley

32. “There is nothing more important to a person who is undergoing a life crisis than to be understood,” Gary likes to say. Being understood is more important than money or property. It’s more important even than winning.”

— Amanda Ripley

33. “The smartest way to help people stay out of high conflict is keep the new identity alive. Help them cultivate those newly revived roles.”

— Amanda Ripley

34. “Most of human history, there were no nation-states, no country identities at all. Humans did not assume they had anything in common with other humans whom they would never lay eyes on, hundreds or thousands of miles away. But since humans invented national identities, we’ve gotten quite convinced of their realness, willing even to kill and to die for them.”

— Amanda Ripley

35. “Emotions are more contagious than any virus. You can catch them through stories, without any human contact. And of all the emotions people experience in conflict, hatred is one of the hardest to work with. If humiliation is the nuclear bomb of emotions, hatred is the radioactive fallout. That’s because hatred assumes the enemy is immutable.”

— Amanda Ripley

36. “Shame rarely has the desired effect, even with people we know. It never works outside of your own tribe, and reporters are almost always on the outside.”

— Amanda Ripley

37. “Listening doesn’t mean agreeing. It doesn’t mean legitimizing or amplifying what other people say. I still decide what to put in the story – and what to keep out. Listening deeply does not mean creating false equivalencies.”

— Amanda Ripley

38. “Self-sufficiency was a religion for Rescorla. He once told a friend that every man should be able to be sent outside naked with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of the year, he should have a business and a savings account.”

— Amanda Ripley

39. “Gary’s model of mediation was built on this idea that everyone needed to be in the room.”

— Amanda Ripley

40. “One way to prevent high conflict is to learn to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs in your orbit. Notice who delights in each new plot twist of a feud. Who is quick to validate every lament and to articulate wrongs no one else has even thought of?”

— Amanda Ripley