Quotes from Alec Wilkinson

One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.

Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.

One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.

Somewhere Chesterton writes--I think it is Chesterton--that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn't deliver him to.

I don't think there is any mystery to understanding the passionate feelings people have for guns. Nobody really believes it's about maintaining a militia. It's about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation.

John Wayne Gacy is obsessively fond of defending his innocence, which is imaginary. On March 12, 1980, he was convicted in Chicago of killing thirty-three boys. The murders took place between 1972 and 1978, when he was caught and arrested. No one else in America has ever been convicted of killing so many people. Twenty-seven of the bodies were buried in a crawl space beneath the house where Gacy lived,

I am by nature a self-improver. I have read Gibbon, I have read Proust. I read the Old and New Testaments and most of Shakespeare. I studied French. I have meditated. I jogged. I learned to draw, using the right side of my brain.

We don't know where numbers come from or why they have the properties they do, unless you believe that they are a system invented by humans based on the ways in which we apprehend the world, a creation of our thinking and therefore our neurology.

No idea is bad unless a person is uncritical. Accepting a guess as a truth, as superstitious people do, is misguided, but so is ignoring a guess, as pedantic people do. As regards ideas, it is only bad not to have any.

Human beings have shone a light on numbers, and we've picked out a logical system," she said. "You can't bring God into this. It's unnecessary." After that I shut up around her about Plato. She also said, "I have to admit I was kind of alarmed when I realized how bad your arithmetic skills were." "How did you know that?" "From the things you would ask.