“To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.”

A benefit by itself is not explanatory; a benefit in a vacuum is indeed a sort of mystery. Until it can be shown how the benefit actually redounds to enhance the replicative power of a replicator, it just sits there, alluring, perhaps, but incapable of explaining anything.

The great biologist D’Arcy Thompson once said: “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” If he is right—if everything is the way it is because it got that way—then every science must be, in part, a historical science.

Between randomness and routine lie the good stories, whose

intentional stance: the strategy of analyzing the flux of events into agents and their (rational) actions and reactions. Such agents—people, in this case—do things for reasons, which can be predicted—up to a point—by cataloguing their reasons, their beliefs and desires, and calculating what, given those reasons, the most rational course of action

Culture is a way of getting people to that point of understanding. The work of a lot of modern culture is to say to people: You’re making value.

languages, practices, ceremonies, edifices, methods, tools, myths, music, art, and so forth that compose that culture.

people are cultural beings. They can’t help themselves.

surprising moments make sense in retrospect, in the framework provided by the unsurprising moments.