Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were l...
You may stay. But Jessica, please watch what you say and do. Don't look them in the eyes for long. Speak only when spoken to. Yes, sir; yes, ma'am." "Sit up. Arf," I teased. "What about her?" Jessica cried, pointing in my general direction. "She's mo...
It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the...
What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on ...
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of hum...
Ridley nodded. 'She told me I couldn't ever tell General Harding or anybody else. Told me I wouldn't be safe.' 'Safe?' Uncle Bob stopped rocking and took the pipe from between his teeth. 'She started in talkin' 'bout you bein' safe, sir?' Ridley nodd...
In 1231, Pope Gregory ordered the Dominicans to take charge of papal courts and decisions and so prevent mob rule and guarantee that the accused received a fair trial and the right of defence. This was the foundation of the Inquisition, and it was a ...
The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth ponder...
The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this ta...
As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generati...
There are two types of empathy: the positive empathy and the negative empathy. When we are fully carried away by the unaware activities of the mirror neurons, we are under the trap of negative empathy. The negative empathy generates attachments. Out ...
Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or experience." So "compassion" means "to endure [something] with another person," to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, to feel her pain as though it we...
I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as in my search for truth. I will read work ... all the more willingly because I have for many years been a partisan of the view because it reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are ent...
The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction...
The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth a...
The single and peculiar mind is bound With all the strength and armor of the mind To keep itself from noyance, but much more That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests The lives of many. The cess of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth dra...
The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they w...
Sir Thomas More was a victim of injustice and irony. Generously and meekly, just as he was about to be martyred, he said: Paul . . . was present, and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be t...
The times do not call for grassroots political activism, as if the next election might be enough to reverse a massive cultural earthquake. They do not call for working a few more speeches, another letter to the editor, another fundraiser, the next vo...
[Henry] James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emo...
The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers...
