Science and industry, and their progress, might turn out to be the most enduring thing in the modern world. Perhaps any speculation about a coming collapse of science and industry is, for the present and for a long time to come, nothing but a dream; ...
It is easy in retrospect to see why he’d want to go. There are two women who are furious at him. To make one happy, he must take the subway across town and arrive on her doorstep. To make the other happy, he must wear for some infinitely long perio...
You raise an eyebrow at me speculatively. “Really?” you enquire your voice full of sarcasm. “Respect me how Jenna? By choosing not to spend any time with me? By not even bothering to let me know where you are? By rolling in when you feel like i...
Advice, then, young yeoman: When referring to the king's middle daughter, state that she is fair, speculate that she is pious, but unless you'd like to spend your watch looking for the box where your head is kept, resist the urge to wax ignorant on h...
It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protes...
The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?
The world became more aware that America-despite being the hope of many who have the personal drive and ambition to become part of the "American dream"-is beset by serious operational challenges: a massive and growing national debt, widening social i...
The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since ...
Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children. Nobody likes children, Yunior, your mother assured you. That doesn't m...
The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing th orient could not do was t...
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to sp...
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentl...
When we consider that so few generations had passed since the church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing scholars to the point of madness for merely speculati...
A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin o...
Since my decisions and choices rely on the information available to me, and in light of the fact that, my decisions and choices are the foundation on which my future is built, I for one like to observe critically. Society may say it's delusional, non...
He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listene...
He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had alwa...
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of chang...
Natural science is founded on minute critical views of the general order of events taking place upon our globe, corrected, enlarged, or exalted by experiments, in which the agents concerned are placed under new circumstances, and their diversified pr...
We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, pre...
I notice that, in the lecture … which Prof. Lowry gave recently, in Paris … he brought forward certain freak formulae for tartaric acid, in which hydrogen figures as bigamist … I may say, he but follows the loose example set by certain Uesanian...
