“A single cause linked to a single effect is not an historical but a laboratory possibility. The difference between them is that life presents a multiplicity of conditions, all of which are causes, whereas laboratory technique permits the artificial isolation and control of single conditions in a one-to-one relation within a closed system.” (Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors)

Professor J. H. Plumb, who with his usual irony applauds innocent play with numbers, does so on this very ground of rhetoric: ‘We are becoming a numerate society: almost instinctively there seems now to be a greater degree of truth in evidence expressed numerically than in any literary evidence, no matter how shaky the statistical evidence, or acute the observing eye. It is often not the numbers that speak the truth, rather there is a quicker acceptance of them in ourselves — almost an excitement’.” (Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors)

“There are many whose faults go undetected only because they are ineffectual: when these grow confident of their strength, they will act no less audaciously than those whose fortunes have already given them opportunity. They lack only the resources to display the full extent of their iniquity. Even a poisonous snake is safe to handle in cold weather, when it is sluggish. Its venom is still there, but inactive. In the same way, there are many people whose cruelty, ambition, or self-indulgence fails to match the most outrageous cases only by the grace of fortune. Just give them the power to do what they want, and you will see: they want the same things as others do.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics)

“In short, the market — like the state, like any institution — has its limitations, as severe as the state’s. Consequently, each device must be controlled by intelligence and adapted to circumstance. For my part, I am a liberal, a conservative, and a socialist, each dogma applicable to some necessary activity. I imagine, in fact, that the triple label applies to most people. Very few want the fire department a private concern; and again most people are communists within the family circle, at least until the children are grown up.” (Jacques Barzun, Letter to Christopher Faille)

“For a long life, you need the help of fate; but to live sufficiently, the essential thing is one’s character. A life is long if it is full, and it is full only when the mind bestows on itself the goodness that is proper to it, claiming for itself the authority over itself. What help are eighty years to a person who has spent his life in doing nothing? Such a person has not lived; he has simply hung around in life. Rather than dying in old age, he has spent a long time dying.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics)

“The achievements of a lifetime, put together with great effort and many answered prayers, are cast to ruin in a single day. But to speak of a day is to make our hastening calamities slower than they really are. An hour, a mere moment is enough to overturn an empire. It would be some relief to our frailty and our concerns if everything came to an end as slowly as it comes into existence. The reality is that it takes time for things to grow but little or no time for them to be lost.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics)

“In the light of this description the analogy so passively received nowadays, of the mind as computer, is manifestly fallacious. A computer does not think, it feels nothing, and what it is said to “know”—bits of information all cast in the digital mode—has no fringe. Nor has it a memory, only storage room. On any point called for, the answer is all or none. Vagueness, intelligent confusion, original punning on words or ideas never occur, the internal hookups being unchangeable; they were determined once for all by the true minds that made the machine and the program. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity; the greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority. Homer nods, Shakespeare writes twaddle, Newton makes mistakes, you and I have been known to talk nonsense. But they and we can (as the phrase goes) surpass ourselves, invent, discover, create. The late John von Neumann, mathematician, logician, and inventor of game theory, would not allow one to liken the mind to a computer. He knew how his mind worked and he understood his computer. So goodbye to all the bright remarks, in fiction and conversation, about programming oneself to pass an interview.” (Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James)

“The soldier who rests at ease outside the camp, since no enemy is on the attack, can be just as brave as the one who, though hamstrung, stays upright on his knees and does not let his weapons drop; still, the cry of “Well done, brave men!” is heard only by those who come back bloody from the front.” (Seneca, Letters on Ethics, Letter 66)

“The newly rich in scientific lore insists that water is H₂O and cannot be those shinning little diamonds that you see on the lawn. He is sure that the birds are not really singing, hopping, and flying about in a delightful way, because all they are doing is mating, feeding, and avoiding their enemies. His monogamous attachment to one idea is at the cost of putting his senses and his candor in escrow. For the sake of pursuing one sublime entertainment of the mind, he prohibits other, no less admirable entertainments and drives us to exclaiming with Blake: ‘May God keep us \\ From single vision and Newton’s sleep.’ The single vision, no matter which, will not satisfy all demands. Time passes differently in jail and in lovers’ meetings or dreamless sleep, and the clock time of a play bears no relation to that of the action scene.” (Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment)

“The schools turned away from the intellectual disciplines and became agencies for adjusting the young generations to the complexities of an industrial world. The technology of so-called mass communication seemingly extended the reach of ideas, but actually dulled public attention by excess and abolished the capacity for quick, common response. In short, the gains produced by the ideal of Diffusion proved, as might have been expected, diffuse.” (Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment)