At a deeper cultural level, Anna Wierzbicka’s English: Meaning and Culture describes how John Locke’s writings on probability, reasonableness, and moderation became ingrained in the English language. The words “reasonable” and “probably” appear in modern English with a frequency and range of application very much higher than their cognates in other European languages, as do words indicating hedges relating to degrees of evidence such as “presumably,” “apparently,” “clearly.” These phenomena indicate an Anglophone mindset that particularly values attention to the uncertainties of evidence.
For in the end, he [Aldous Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
The hard part is identifying excellence and crafting the rules of the game to elicit it. Of course, it’s immensely harder to govern scientific research than football.--Nicholas Gruen
To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.
Stoicism and Zen have certain things in common. They both, for example, stress the importance of contemplating the transitory nature of the world around us and the importance of mastering desire, to the extent that it is possible to do so. They also advise us to pursue tranquility and give us advice on how to attain and maintain it. Furthermore, I came to realize that Stoicism was better suited to my analytical nature than Buddhism was. As a result, I found myself, much to my amazement, toying with the idea of becoming, instead of a practicing Zen Buddhist, a practicing Stoic.
Citizens never formed a deliberative whole but remained an unthinking herd. “When a candidate for public office faces the voters, he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas.”
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