Philosophers provide the critical foundation for politics but should leave the politicizing to the scores of individuals that are closest to the situations that politics affects.

Sportswriters know too much to save them from disgrace in Mudville, and so the task falls to the flacks and publicists, the stylists, image consultants, and crisis managers who have become our newfound instruments of redemption.

According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, Ibsen’s response “fell upon him like a benison at the beginning of his career. He had entered the world of literature under the best auspices in that world…Before Ibsen’s letter Joyce was an Irishman; after it he was a European.

There was already a deep sense of nervousness among the people searching the sequences for disease clues – not to mention the nervousness among the people who had given them huge piles of money to do so.

Bourchier was no ordinary journalist, but a champion of Bulgaria’s cause even after it sided with Germany in the first World War. He was a confidant of King Boris III and the country’s unofficial representative at the peace conference in Paris; it was Boris who consented to the old Portora boy’s wish to be buried at the ancient Rila monastery.

Poetry and applied mathematics both mix apples and oranges by aspiring to combine multiple meanings and beauty using symbols. These symbols point to things outside themselves, and create internal structures that aim for beauty…A few symbols convey a great deal. The symbols’ full meanings and their effectiveness in creating meanings and beauty remain inexhaustible.

When Templeton created his foundation in the mid-’80s, conventional wisdom still largely held that religion would retreat as science secularized the world. But in Templeton’s eyes, this made religion the perfect investment.