We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information - all in short (and loud) doses of "easy listening".

Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.

People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.