If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

Voting is the next-to-last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster.

There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution.

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.