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" Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. "

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" Many of us will be obsessed with one or another kind of secret or revelation, be it gossip about friends or ourselves, a fantasy about spies, or a worry about the most personal information now stored in data banks. But few of us think about secrets in general, or about the moral rights and wrongs of hiding or exposing them. "

" The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning, and insufferably dull. "

" Brain science will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century. "

" All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them. "

" Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian. "

" It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences. "

" One of Kuhn's marvellous legacies is science studies as we know it today. "

" The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum. "

" Although some secrecy is odious, some is essential just to preserve our sense of self. "

" As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers. "

" Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings. "

" Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life. "

" In every generation, there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy. "

" Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas. "

" Great books are rare. "

" Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do. "

" Secrecy is one of the shadier sides of private and public life. "

" If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser. "

" Antonio Damasio is a distinguished neuroscientist with a flair for writing about science and an enthusiasm for philosophizing. "

" The social risks that worry us are not a random bundle of frights. "

" One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing. "

" Amartya Sen is best known to the general reader for his powerful essays on famine. He is an optimist about some of our gravest economic problems, such as mass starvation in a world that at present can easily produce more food than everyone can eat. Reason and voluntary participation are his watchwords. "

" Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion. "

" Some people say they use images to help them remember intricacies. Others say they just remember. If they are able to form an image of the face, it is because they remember how it was: it is not that an image guides memory, but that memory produces an image, or the sense of imaging. We have no agreed way to talk clearly about such things. "

" If you are a researcher and want to publish a paper, if you are applying for money either from a private or public foundation, you have to have a DSM code. "

" Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help. "

" Dolomite is a whole mess of stuff, a mixture. It gets characterised as 'a stuff' because of the interest of oil geologists. It would have been a nonentity were it not for its applications. "

" I think it's unfortunate when people say that there is just one true story of science. For one thing, there are many different sciences, and historians will tell different stories corresponding to different things. "

" I have this extraordinary curiosity about all subjects of the natural and human world and the interaction between the physical sciences and the social sciences. "

" A 'philosophical dictionary' is not a dictionary of philosophy that you use to look up obscure thinkers or recondite terms. It is a collection of brief and pithy essays on diverse topics, informed by one vision, and usually arranged in alphabetical order. "