The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally ...apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But a dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down--very important traits in times l...ike these. In fact, just as soon as a dog comes along who, in addition to these qualities, also knows when to buy and sell stocks, he can be moved right up to the boy's bedroom and the boy can sleep in the dog house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The good enough parent, in addition to being convinced that whatever his child does, he does it because at that moment he is convi...nced this is the best he can do, will also ask himself: "What in the world would make me act as my child acts at this moment? And if I felt forced to act this way, what would make me feel better about it?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare man...kind for all its later surprises.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What sunk me very low was the sensation that I was precisely as when in wretched low spirits thirty years ago, without any additio...n to my character from my having had the friendship of Dr. Johnson and many eminent men, made the tour of Europe, and Corsica in particular, and written two very successful books. I was as a board on which fine figures had been painted, but which some corrosive application had reduced to its original nakedness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week bef...ore you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a commonplace that all religion expresses itself in mythological or metaphorical terms; it says one thing and means another;... it uses imagery to convey truth. But the crucial fact about religion is not that it is metaphor, but that it is unconscious metaphor. No one can express any thought without using metaphors, but this does not reduce all philosophy and science to religion, because the scientist knows that his metaphors are merely metaphors and that the truth is something other than the imagery by which it is expressed, whereas in religion the truth and the imagery are identified. To repeat the Creed as a religious act it is necessary not to add "All this I believe in a symbolical or figurative sense": to make that addition is to convert religion into philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider Ireland.... You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest exe...cutive in the world. That is the Irish Question.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the hig...hest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »