Nothing is off the record except what you don’t say.
An irreducible minimum of undesirables is always with us, and the sole policy question, in many guises, is how to herd them.
That there is no difference, in practice, between stupid and evil is only an instance of the more general principle that there is none between can’t and won’t.
We imagine that we have absorbed Einstein when we have yet to come to grips with Maxwell.
There is news today, and still you are the same.
A name can confirm understanding, or confound it, but never confer it.
The enduring lessons of the First World War are how not to fight a war and why not to fight one.
Accurate measurement created much of the modern world, not least its tendency to take variation for apocalypse.
We credit vaccines with what we owe to sanitation, and the rest of medicine with what we owe to vaccines.
Pretentious nonsense is written in a certain unmistakable cadence, a low hum calculated to lull you into acquiescence through inattention. You’re not supposed to try too hard to piece the meaning together, and you are always sorry if you do.