Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression.

Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them.

We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you’re good at.

If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals – molecules or humans – might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws.

I don’t think that taste should be the decider of moral issues.

I think that the idea that there’s such a thing as a national literature that’s somehow uniquely expressive of a national soul or culture or mentality is probably also something that nobody really believes in anymore.

You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you’re not going, they’re not going to be very effective.

For the kind of places I’ve written for and the kind of writing that I’ve done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who’s like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.