Verbatim

Conscience is a creator of meaning. As a sense of constraint rooted in our emotional ties to one another, it prevents life from devolving into nothing but a long and essentially boring game of attempted dominance over our fellow human beings, and for every limitation conscience imposes on us, it gives us a moment of [...]

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We often think of memory in a nostalgic or trivial way - such as knowing the capital of the United States or being able to find our car keys - and as somethng relating simply to the past. Yet the reason our brains have remarkabley powerful capacities for memories is that memory is actually for [...]

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The democratization of technology has made NGOs more powerful and terrorism more lethal. The United States must adjust its mental framework to this new landscape. Our post-9/11 focus has been on the use of hard power - the top board - when the problems we face stem from transnational issues on the bottom board. One [...]

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His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge…..That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it…. “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is [...]

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Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for [...]

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By these methods, in a few weeks there starts up many a writer capable of managing the profoundest and most universal subjects. For what though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full? And if you will bate him but the circumstances of method, and style, and grammar, and invention; allow [...]

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We should inure our Minds to Method and Order continually; and when we take in any fresh Ideas, Occurrences and Observations, we should dispose of them in their proper Places, and see how they stand and agree with the rest of our Notions on the same Subject: As a Scholar would dispose of a new [...]

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When I meet with any thing that I think fit to put into my Common-Place-Book, I first find a proper Head. Suppose, for example, that the Head be EPISTOLA, I look into the Index for the first Letter and the following Vowel which in this instance are E.I. If in the space marked E.I. there [...]

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My friends who are professors tell me that students often try to have quotations do the interpretative work for them, that they let replication replace analysis, that the collective attention span of today’s college generation has shortened even more than that of the MTV-Watchers of my generation. The Internet has made it not only possible, [...]

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While I find the urge to collect the words and wisdom of others an understandable way to mark one’s developing self–and not a bad way to spend time–I do have some nagging questions about all this quoting. I wonder if transcription isn’t sometimes standing in for thinking, as in the days of copy books. Or [...]

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