Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.

Davy was the type of all the jumped-up second-raters of all time.

Civilization is hideously fragile... there's not much between us and the Horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

Nothing is easier to avoid than publicity. If one genuinely doesn't want it, one doesn't get it.

This ability to incorporate the past gives the sharpest diagnostic tool, if one asks whether a body of knowledge is a science or not. Do present practitioners have to go back to an original work of the past? Or has it been incorporated? ... Science is cumulative, and embodies its past.

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.