The person of faith cannot accept reason as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith...
Weirdly, there have been a lot of critics of conservatism, but very few critics of innovation. As a culture, we are deeply paranoid about politics, but we gaze upon innovation with rapturous adulation.
Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.
As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.
As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.
The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.
In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.
In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.
As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants.
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.
Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.
Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.
We have discharged one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We find only that we forget, when times are good, that times were ever bad.
Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.
Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.
One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.
Book reviewing dates only to the eighteenth century, when, for the first time, there were so many books being printed that magazines - they were new, too - started printing essays about them.
When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.
