That which in the English-speaking world is known by everyone as “science” was not always so designated.
The dismay that may be aroused by our inability to answer questions about first and last things is something for which ordinary people have long since worked out for themselves Voltaire’s remedy: “We must cultivate our garden.”
Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science
Once declared “conquered,” infectious diseases have emerged or reemerged to devastate our modern world.
As we struggle with health care reform, the strength, passion, and single-mindedness of Lillian Wald should serve as an inspiring example of creative ways to fund the path for progress in combating not just the microorganisms but societal ills.
Robert Gaynes, Germ Theory
Here in Hey Presto! I offer a new reading of A Tale of a Tub.
For if Swift began his Ur-Tub in Dublin, then it was also to the Tub’s reception that we should attribute his return to Dublin in exile as dean of St. Patrick’s.
Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, Hey Presto!
In 1865 Isaac Todhunter published A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to that of Laplace.
Thus although the emergence of probability is a transformation in opinion, the emergence of ‘probability-and-induction’ is more complete event depending on parallel transformations in high science and low science.
Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability
From the beginning, the Tea Party movement, as a loose confederation of leaders, activists, and sympathizers, has said it’s about conservative principles: small government, the free market, and governmental fiscal responsibility.
Without question, the election of Barack Obama is truly change they can’t believe in.
Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In
In July of 1654 Blaise Pascal wrote to Pierre Fermat about a gambling problem which came to be known as the Problem of Points: Two players are interrupted in the midst of a game of chance, with the score uneven at that point.
But it has nonetheless been a story full of wonders, and the only prediction we can make with certainty is that it will continue to be so.
Gerd Gigerenzer, Zeno Swijtink, Theodore Porter, Lorraine Datson, John Beatty, and Lorenz Krüger, The Empire of Chance
The crime of theft holds a prominent place in our law and in our culture.
It is my hope that the analysis presented in this book will provide the impetus for needed reform.
Stuart Green, Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle
The story of this book begins with a hoax.
But this, of course, is only a hope, and perhaps only a dream.
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense
George Henry White’s “Defense of the Negro Race” in 1901 opened the twentieth century with an appeal to the national interest of all Americans in promoting the improved social status of African Americans.
Without the voices of African Americans shaping state planning policy, the chances of reducing inequality for immigrants, the poor, and racial minorities shrank as the twenty-first century began.
Walter David Greason, Suburban Erasure
One day while browsing the World Wide Web (obviously for work—not just wasting time), I stumbled on the following ad, on the Web site of a magazine, the Economist.
This is also where businesses and policy makers could revise their thinking and consider how to design their policies and products as to provide free lunches.
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational
Dortmunder did not like to stand around on street corners.
“Oh, all right,” he said.
Donald Westlake, Get Real
She was coughing, always coughing, and sometimes she coughed up blood.
If she’d gone outside she would have seen the smoke twist out of the chimney, reaching as high as it could go till the wind flattened it and drove it out to sea.
T. C. Boyle, San Miguel
This is a book about the law.
In this context, the politics of rights can be recommended because it is linked to the ethic of rights but is not caught up in the sterile dogmatism of the myth of rights.
Stuart Scheingold, The Politics of Rights
Hi Cass!
“If that’s what healthy holidays do for you, I think I’ll take up smoking again!”
Reginald Hill, The Price of Butcher’s Meat
One afternoon in Rio de Janeiro, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was eating dinner in his favorite restaurant.
One hundred years from now, I predict that there will still be few things quite as satisfying as filling in both sides of an equals sign.
Dana MacKenzie, The Universe in Zero Words
There are some things that money can’t buy these days, but not many.
Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy
Midnight.
She moves forward to greet them.
Reginald Hill, Midnight Fugue
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
“Why, then I’ll teach you to play and sing,
For I dearly
love a good harp,” said she.
Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn
The literature of Criticism is not small or negligible, and its chief figures, from Aristotle onwards, have often been among the first intellects of their age.
The second, I would remind that I write in an age when, in the majority of social circles, to be seriously interested in art is to be thought an oddity.
I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
Valera had fallen back from his squadron and was cutting the wires of another rider’s lamp.
Move on to the next question.
Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers
In this chapter, you will learn how Android came about.
This makes game development on Android even easier.
Marko Gargenta, Learning Android
never much of a street
She pressed Delete and went downstairs to do some ironing.
Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man
In June 1879, the American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce was on a steamship journey from Boston to New York when his gold watch was stolen from his stateroom.
And so my parents did not sleep that night, while my father taught my mother how to sew.
Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.
Between Barton and Delaford, there was that constant communication which strong family affection would naturally dictate;—and among the merits and the happiness of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within sight of each other, they could live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
On the morning of January 6, two hours before dawn, a man named Robert Clinch rolled out of bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“Wait,” Catherine said, taking his arm, “now I do.”
Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy
The trees were tall, but I was taller, standing above them on a steep mountain slope in northern California.
How wild it was, to let it be.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild
On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm.
Yancy pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture for Neville.
Carl Hiaasen, Bad Monkey
Oil lamps burned late into the night at Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, all through the fall of 1879.
“I want to get back to work.”
Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison
As biologists our great aim is to find order in all the diversity and complexity of the living world.
To make a grand summary of some of the major points in this essay, here is a very crude diagram that brings those points together (fig. 14).
John Bonner, Randomness in Evolution
On the afternoon of November 25, a woman named JoLayne Lucks drove to the Grab N’Go minimart in Grange, Florida, and purchased spearmint Certs, unwaxed dental floss and one ticket for the state Lotto.
She was laughing as she chased him up the hill, into the tall pines.
Carl Hiaasen, Lucky You
“Can we just leave?”
And I love you too.
André Aciman, Harvard Square
When I was growing up in the South Coast of England in the 1950s, I was haunted by a vision of judgment.
After all, to be Thane of Cawdor is no mean thing.
Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition
On July 16th, in the aching torpid heat of the South Florida summer, Terry Whelper stood at the Avis counter at Miami International Airport and rented a bright red Chrysler LeBaron convertible.
He never got a glimpse of the shy and nocturnal creatures, although he returned to New York with a cellophane packet of suspect rodent droppings and a pledge to keep searching.
Carl Hiaasen, Native Tongue
This is a book about information, technology, and scientific progress.
May we arise from the ashes of these beaten but not bowed, a little more modest about our forecasting abilities, and a little less likely to repeat our mistakes.
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
At the stroke of eleven on a cool April night, a woman named Joey Perrone went overboard from a luxury deck of the cruise liner M.V. Sun Duchess.
“No, Dr. Perrone, you are not.”
Carl Hiaasen, Skinny Dip
My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service.
Dearest Serena, it’s up to you.
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
Thursday, September 18, 2008, was a fine late-summer day in Washington—blue skies, temperatures in the seventies.
But our Congress is still broken.
Robert Kaiser, Act of Congress
Regarding the death of James Bradley Stomarti: what first catches my attention is his age.
“Can you, Jack?”
Carl Hiaasen, Basket Case
Sit down in the middle of a quiet room, sparsely furnished for preference.
On the other, the postwar Surrealist motto: Prière de toucher (please touch).
Roger-Pol Droit, Astonish Yourself!
“Dinner is nearly ready, Madam” I said.
Because, as I would always tell myself so many hears later, lying here in my bed: You can’t start out again in life, that’s a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be once you’ve finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again in order to figure out what you couldn’t understand before, in order to understand life, isn’t that so Fatma?
Orhan Pamuk, Silent House
Thinking is hard.
We’re hot on the trail of the answers.
Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps
The image is iconic—the wild halo of white hair, the rumpled suit, the enigmatic smile, the piercing eyes.
If we were able to reclaim this rich understanding of meritocracy that is our heritage, our fruitless and interminable arguments about class, race, and IQ could then fade away into the oblivion that they so richly deserve.
Elaine E. Castles, Inventing Intelligence
I have set three aims before me in constructing this book.
But it is better to realise that these powers can be studied, and that what criticism most needs is less poeticising and more detailed analysis and investigation.
I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
On a half a mile of immaculate private beach, along Florida’s fabled Gold Cost, sits the sugar-pink Boca Raton Hotel, designed in a gracious Mediterranean style by the Palm Beach architect Addison Minzer.
A new era of finance has dawned.
Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold
If the state did not exist, would it be necessary to invent it?
Or less.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Before God mentioned her, Khawla bint Tha‘laba was apparently an ordinary woman living in seventh-century Medina in the Arabian Peninsula.
We should have confidence in the full power of God to guide us to a correct understanding, but always, always, with the humility to acknowledge that wa Allahu ‘alam: “But God knows better.”
Ingrid Mattson, The Story of the Qur’an
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the
age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of
belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of
Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had
nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way—in short, the period was so far
like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on
its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of
comparison only.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
This is a work of unabashed advocacy.
In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded local concentration, a shared knot of replicator power.
Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype
At 10:30 p.m. on March 3, 1953, in a one-story brick building at the end of Olden Lane in Princeton, New Jersey, Italian Norwegian mathematical biologist Nils Aall Barricelli inoculated a 5-kilobyte digital universe with random numbers generated by drawing playing cards from a shuffled deck.
“There must be something about this code that you haven’t explained yet.”
George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
Philo Vance, as you may remember, took a solitary trip to Egypt immediately after the termination of the Garden murder case.
It ceased to be the “purple house,” and took on a more domestic and gemütlich appearance, and has so remained to the present day.
S. S. Van Dine, The Kidnap Murder Case
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Otherwise who would be here when the King came again?
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
Stroll down the Boulevard St. Germain in the chic sixth arrondissement of Paris on a summer evening, and you’re liable to encounter an extraordinary character of the crossroads.
“Me too,” I whispered, my green boner helmet glistening in the moonlight.
Graham Jones, Trade of the Tricks
It was exactly three months after the startling termination of the Scarab murder case that Philo Vance was drawn into the subtlest and the most perplexing of all the criminal problems that came his way during the four years of John F.-X. Markham’s incumbency as District Attorney of New York County.
Sometimes I think that Vance would rather part with one of his treasured Cézannes than with little Miss MacTavish.
S. S. Van Dine, The Kennel Murder Case
James Madison Jr. entered the world at midnight of the night of April 16-17, 1751.
His legacy must speak for itself.
Kevin Gutzman, James Madison and the Making of America
Philo Vance, curiously enough, always liked the Gracie Allen murder case more than any of the others in which he participated.
“I don’t get it.”
S. S. Van Dine, The Gracie Allen Murder Case
In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
The glimmerings of change that are already apparent in the intellectual climate are a hopeful augury.
Milton Freedman, Capitalism and Freedom
On the night of September sixth, the eve of Paul Gauber’s wedding, his buddies took him to a strip joint near Fort Lauderdale for a bachelor party.
Her application to the academy at Quantico is currently under review.
Carl Hiaasen, Strip Tease
About twelve years ago, we conducted a simple experiment with the students in a psychology course we were teaching at Harvard University.
Our final hope is that you will always consider this possibility before you jump to a harsher conclusion.
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla
The day they drowned Dendale I were seven years old.
At a grunted signal from Andy Daziel, they turned their faces to the rising fell and went to keep their rendezvous on Beulah Height.
Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height
Dead, and no one told me.
I kiss your toes.
Peter Carey, The Chemistry of Tears
When Steve Nelson became a Communist in 1923, he had just arrived in Philadelphia from his Croatian homeland.
Only now, under the impact of a globalized, yet atomized, capitalist system, political repression may have become so diffuse that we do not recognize it when it occurs.
Ellen Schrecker, Many Are The Crimes
This page last modified on 2014 August 3.