It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem; to this day I avoid… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Silver Rule in intellectual debates. You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a charlatan — say the writer and pseudo-rationalist Sam Harris — is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”) — for the latter requires an extensive grasp of the proposed idea. Note that the same applies to the interpretation of religious texts, often extracted from their broader circumstances.

To understand "progress": all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome).

It is generally accepted that harm from doctors not including risks from hospital germs accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.