Life is given us as a passion.

The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.

Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens - all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.

To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.