The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to ea...
To say that the humanities can be a path to truth itself is to challenge one of our most closely held beliefs. We live not only in a scientific world, but also in a scientistic one: a world that thinks that science - empirical, objective, quantifiabl...
A person needs a basic trust of life and humanity in order to allow all this to happen, to believe more in human goodness than he or she fears its evil. This person has to trust that most people are good people—and also trust that this isn't an axe...
Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or la...
Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of ...
Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this ve...
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my ...
The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble -- to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer...
Everyone ate as a group, and a huge cauldron of dumpster-dived gruel bubbled over a campfire, tended by a grubby-handed group of chefs dicing potatoes and onions on a piece of cardboard on the ground. Huck [Finn] may have been right that a 'barrel of...
The statue of Justice, symbol of the law, as she holds aloft her balance scale, is blindfolded. Justice is blind to race, creed, color – and to personal eccentricity. If there were a comparable state of Clio, the Muse of history, she would have to ...
Then the coxswain called out, 'Ready all!' Joe turned and faced the rear of the boat, slid his seat forward, sank the white blade of his oar into the oil-black water, tensed his muscles, and waited for the command that would propel him forward into t...
The French believe that kids feel confident when they're able to do things for themselves, and do those things well. After children have learned to talk, adults don't praise them for saying just anything. They praise them for saying interesting thing...
When I think about "Freedom" and America's future. You have to remember that "Freedom" is more about what you do in the trying moments......how you move forward.......and what path you set. It's more about who you are as a person..........like family...
I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you coul...
Lying is a full time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you're stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the m...
And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside,...
The chowdry, or burqa -- the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud -- is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman's already ...
For throughout history, the synthesizing impulse has proved a powerful even world-changing, tool for understanding the universe, capable of penetrating the intricate,contradictory web of surface phenomena to reveal the universal,unified cosmos beneat...
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly r...
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don’t mind admitting it. They worship money and po...
(John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinchin...
