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" I'm a dilettante. My governing word is 'curiosity.' "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Foucault is one of many who want a new conception of how power and knowledge interact. But he is not looking for a relation between two givens, 'power' and 'knowledge.' As always, he is trying to rethink the entire subject matter, and his 'knowledge' and 'power' are to be something else. "

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

" Each of us becomes a new person as we re-describe the past. "

" Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images. "

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

" 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. "

" Great books are rare. "

" 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. "

" The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun. "

" The stability of what's called the Standard Model of particle physics and its ability to make so many clever predictions with immense precision suggests that we may just be stuck with it, and there may never be an overthrow of that. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Among the lesser effects of quantum theory are gaping holes in old ideas about causality. "

" It is possible to argue that our present conception of revolution was staked out more securely in science than in political action. "

" Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption. "

" 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. "

" 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. "