America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

[Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.

Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust.