What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.
No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15.
The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, ‘How dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’
While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet – which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.
God is the celebrity author of the world’s best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
History had been man’s effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man’s ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.
The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.
What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?
Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.
When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.