Are all arranged marriages successful? No more than all romantic marriages are. But, ultimately, what makes a marriage work is not how it began what you do with it. Mutual respect, realistic expectations and a willingness to compromise may…

According to the rules of reason, a given conclusion is to be deemed true if, and only if, it flows from a logical sequence of thoughts founded on sound initial premises. Considering mathematics to be the model of good thinking, philosophe…

That nineteenth-century Britain was radically unequal is self-evidently true. For many, the difference in power and wealth between,on one hand, the very rich and others holding dominant positions in the British Establishment, and,on the ot…

If you are indecisive and plan to do something about it, you can take immediate comfort in the fact that indecision is not necessarily due to ignorance and slow thinking. On the contrary it is often thinking of so many things and considera…

The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales. A person is either good or bad, nothing in between…

There are plenty of people who worry about language change. England seems to be full of people who write to the newspapers and the BBC complaining about the way in which the language is becoming corrupt, without appearing to realize that t…

On the other hand, you can exclude a great deal of distracting noise from your attention when you are getting to know an attractive stranger at a party, concentrating single-mindedly on the words being spoken. Unlike simple recording equip…

There are a lot of people today who demand that men of science should devote themselves to the pursuit of discoveries that can immediately be turned to account. To my mind, however, there could be no surer way of rendering the future compl…

The antithesis to labor is play. When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it, but it is a purely private activity; society could not care less whether we play it or not.Between labor and play stands wor…

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have …

Science is the attempt to discover, by means of observation, and reasoning based upon it, first, particular facts about the world, and then laws connecting facts with one another and in fortunate cases making it possible to predict future …

On March 30, 1961, Ronald Reagan spoke to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. He spoke these timeless words with great conviction:“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the blo…

If, therefore, I would observe the vow I had taken, I must abjure eggs. I therefore did so. This was a hardship in as much as inquiry showed that even in vegetarian restaurants many courses used to contain eggs. This meant that unless I kn…