The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.

This is an age in which one cannot find common sense without a search warrant.

Few things are as stimulating as other people's calamities observed from a safe distance.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can't trick me, young man. It's nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.

Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.

Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition.