It is not easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by a process of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let them revert to their primitive state of wildness. [...] In political civilization, the state is an abstraction and the relationship of men ut...
The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomita...
The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with “eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value o...
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, b...
In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachi...
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential i...
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.
Girly’ products can spur Japan’s growth in this century every bit as much as, if not more than, the ‘manly’ technologies.
My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.
Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.
If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.
It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.
Everyone is drinking. She can feel them out there drinking, turning into beasts.
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
I want to steal 100 years. If I get caught, it’ll be the trial of the century.
The instruments, glassware, and chemical reagents necessary for my project were the same as my 19th-century predecessors had.
I find that in the 21st century, there's not a lot of compassion for what other people are going through or the walk that they have to walk.
Right up to the middle of this century all perceptions of the world around us were delivered via the bookshelf or the paper route.
Now everyone leaking and tweeting and posting on everyone else is the acknowledged way to get ahead in the 21st century.
The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster way back in the 19th century, and somehow it managed to survive.
