One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers