History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised. The Confessions are Augustine’s own first draft of hist...
The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.
What a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past! To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything-- makes one gentle and pliable.
But in the present century, thanks in good part to the influence of , we have come to see that the unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, they had better lead to something interesting.
take words and make them useful,' she told me. 'drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean and make them mean something useful instead.
This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?
Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.
I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usaully goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind.
Men's indignation, it seems, is more exited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.
There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.
True deduction can only be obtained through a certain amount of self annihilation.
It would be, like all of Pammy's parties, hot and crowded and filled with impossibly glamorous people with hip bones so sharp they could qualify as concealed weapons.
On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: "I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.
