Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All that is noble in the world's past history, and especially the minds of the great and the good, are never lost.
Without the connotation good or bad, bin Laden's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history.
Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.
I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it.
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.