Why do we seek narratives that move from less to more rather than from more to less, if the sum total is the same?

the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being—the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers,

policy change and cultural change are hardly the same thing, existing on different time scales.

of the stars, and already begin to have a new enjoyment. Betelgeuse

Galileo, who was right about so much, was also wrong about so much—something worth remembering as we train ourselves in the cultural acrobatics of nuanced appreciation without idolatry.

“Was there ever a woman without vanity? or a man either? only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.”

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

At watershed moments of upheaval and transformation, we anticipate with terror the absence of the familiar parts of life and of ourselves that are being washed away by the current of change. But we fail to envision the unfamiliar gladnesses and gratifications the new tide would bring, the unfathomed presences, for our imaginations are bounded by

To be a revolutionary is to be in possession of an imagination capable of leaping across the frontier of the familiar to envision a new order in which what is gained eclipses the ill-serving comforts of what is lost.