Recap
The episode begins with Pierce telling his class about ambition. Towards the end of the lecture, he asks the class o submit their papers to Lewicki and Lewicki is supposed to read them all the same night. One of the students, Bryan is seen dozing in between the lecture. At home, Lewicki is frustrated that none of the students remembered to do a spell check; except one guy; Brian Cahill, the sleeping beauty. Pierce goes to the Principal and tells him that Brian’s paper is plagiarized and he feels that there is no way that Brian could have written that paper as it is too good. Brian is a football star. Pierce wants him thrown out, but Haley says that there is no proof that Brian cheated. ..
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Episode Quotes
Daniel: How bad do you want it?
Whether it be a 4.0 GPA, a million bucks, or just getting laid. Ambition drives us all. What William James called the worship of the bitch goddess Success. Now Freud would have us believe that all drives stem from the libido. Sorry Sigmund, success is neurologically determined by one's ability to stay focused on a task. And persistence is a function of an active limbic system.
Daniel: Take for instance grid-iron guy here. Clearly his limbic system isn't firing on all cylinders. Either that or his ambition to win the Heisman supersedes his desire to pass this class.
Daniel: Our ambitions and our dreams give us a glimpse of a beautiful someday and they can help us get through a sometimes less than beautiful today.
It's a tricky thing though--ambition. It can blind us to the price of success, it can consume us, leading to dangerous obsessions, or empty hedonism.
But no matter how much we're fueled by this natural neurological impulse, ambition isn't carved in stone.
Dreams change... and even if we don't get to climb mountains, there's still a chance that we can move them. In the words of those old English poets, you can't always get what you want but if you try sometime you might find you get what you need.
Brian Cahill: Since I was a little kid, football's been my life. If I wasn't playing I was training. I never wanted to do anything else. So what the hell am I if I'm not a football player?