When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about - was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. [...] That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.