In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’
[T]here is nothing in marble equal to the Venus of Medici, for ſoftneſs and tenderneſs; as there is nothing ſo ſtrong and nervous, as the Hercules Farneſe.
We are becoming as a nation, as a world, indeed, atom-conscious. Many of us are already afflicted with atomphobia, though so far it has manifested itself only in a mirage of autoaeromotive discs and a war of words between chronic optimists and empirical pessimists concerning civilization’s probable future.
Appropriate guilt is experienced when we actually do something objectively wrong—for example, exploit another, betray a trust, and so on. […] Inappropriate guilt occurs from believing a lie and is resolved by an application of the truth.
The native speaker's grammatical competence is reflected in two types of intuition which speakers have about their native language(s) — (i) intuitions about sentence well-formedness, and (ii) intuitions about sentence structure. The word intuition is used here in a technical sense which has become standardised in Linguistics: by saying that a native speaker has intuitions about the well-formedness and structure of sentences, all we are saying is that he has the ability to make judgments about whether a given sentence is well-formed or not, and about whether it has a particular structure or not. [...]
"More and more, the shrewdest thinkers and artists are precocious archeologists of ... ruins-in-the-making, indignant or stoical diagnosticians of defeat, enigmatic choreographers of the complex spiritual movements useful for individual survival in an era or permanent apocalypse."