Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources-certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. [:] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history-and you become an acive agent, not merely a 'reporter.'

Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to …

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious …

And yet I think that the Full House model does teach us to treasure variety for its own sake-for tough reasons of evolutionary theory and nature's ontology, an…

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to bo…

There yet remains but one concluding tale, And then this chronicle of mine is ended- Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me, A sinner. Not without purpose did …