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

The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.

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

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.

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

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.