Mark Twain on Sermonizing
“Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”
Amen to that!
“Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”
Amen to that!
“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something…
In many ways, Jeremy Bentham was all about equality. As the father of utilitarianism, he believed that all social policy should be designed to maximize the happiness and pleasures of humans’ experience while minimizing the pains and miseries. And in espousing this theory of justice, he didn’t distinguish between upper class and lower class and…
A quote from Far From the Tree I thought I’d share: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together,…
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quotable people in history of the English language. He even had ideas about robots, many decades before people had any idea what robots could achieve. And in typical Wildean fashion, he provocatively tied it together with his attitudes on the advantages of slavery: “Unless there are slaves to…
I have done some research on political partisanship, as well as some writing. I think political dysfunction in this country threatens our future. So it was nice to read this opening paragraph, in a relatively recent and wonderfully written article in Time magazine: Here’s a rainy-season parable about cooperation in American politics: In July 2012,…
I don’t read much war history. I’m fascinated by what causes humans to end up in a state of war, but not so interested in the bloody details of how they fight their battles. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed The Day of Battle, a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson. The book covers the war…