Quotes About Author

Unfortunately, there is no contemporary history of Rome prior to about 200 BC, when centuries of oral traditions were first committed to writing.

In his magisterial The Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch was quite correct that 'Luther's writing of 1543 is a blueprint for the Nazi's Kristallnacht of 1938'

There is an additional and compelling question that probably also will go unaddressed: what is a Protestant? In this brief Introduction I will demonstrate that the category 'Protestant' includes so much variation on such important matters as to be essentially meaningless, except when used very narrowly.

paganism was "no more than a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition."3

To sum up: the Reformations resulted in state churches that were even more repressive of individuals than the Catholic Church ever attempted to be. The Reformations did not contribute anything to religious freedom

Europe's elites, 'the Reformation replaced loyalty to Christendom with loyalty to "nation", and it also replaced Christian identity with national identity'.

Nationalism' has become a much overused term, subject to far too many and often muddled definitions.

Belief in the virtues of work and of simple living did accompany the rise of capitalism, but this was centuries before Martin Luther was born.

whom we betrayed and sold down the river when we left Afghanistan, leaving them and their families to the mercy of the victors.

We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.

I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.

Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare. Sparks also said his novels are like Greek Tragedies. This may actually be true. I can't check it out because, tragically, no really bad Greek tragedies have survived.

That's how I gained a lifelong fondness for repeating certain phrases beyond the point of all reason.

and the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.

calling out, "Trog! Trog!" As if Trog knew the

The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investor's Business Daily.

Being right on a stock had something of the purity of a perfect move in chess; it had an intellectual resonance.

The time I like best is 6am when the snow is 6 inches deep which I'm yet to discover 'cause I'm under the covers fast, fast asleep

Indeed, it occasionally seems as if the book has attempted to inoculate itself against the prospect of actually being read.

Awareness, I take to be one aspect-the passive aspect-of the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness has an active aspect also, namely the feeling of free will.

do not see how natural selection, in itself, can evolve algorithms which could have the kind of conscious judgements of the validity of other algorithms that we seem to have.

In order to decide whether or not an algorithm will actually work, one needs insights, not just another algorithm.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Žižek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Žižek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.