Citations

By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters, which may be so infinitely varied, that the words complicated and deduced thence will not be contained within the compass of the firmament; ten words...

Being a leftie is like being a Catholic, in that it’s a constant stream of neverending guilt.

It’s not easy figuring out where the red line is for satire anymore. But it’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.

When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the...

A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point. The work cannot be...

There are a sort of little knacks and frivolous subtleties from which men sometimes expect to derive reputation and applause: as poets, who compose whole poems with every line beginning with the same letter; we see the shapes...

But Nietzsche did not surrender. In one of his last typewritten letters he addressed media-technological complements and/or human substitu­tion: the phonograph and the secretary. “This machine,” he observed in another...

Compared to other contemporary programming languages, Ruby does sometimes look old-fashioned. But it’s important to keep in mind that “never be too innovative” is also a key to creating beautiful code.”

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious,...

In the American translation of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in thirty-five volumes—which is among the great dictionaries, being both a reference work and a unique testimony to the period of the cold war—the word pravda is...