“There is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.”

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity.

Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one’s vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

Most civilized lives are measured out with coffee spoons.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other’s words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way that we are going.

Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues. . . .

It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. Its overuse is its greatest danger, and the writer who can’t resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking.

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labor leader interested in the labor movement.

Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

The key to selecting the winner isn’t choosing the face you think is the most beautiful but rather the face other people will pick

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.

There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.