In Germany, as in parts of Yorkshire, laughing — at least among people with pretensions to rank — was regarded as a form of weakness. Goethe, whose o… - Paul Johnson

There is in Israelite-Jewish literature of this period none of the aimlessness of pagan myth and chronicle. The narrative is set down with an overwhelming purpose, to tell the story, both elevating and minatory, of a people’s relationship with God, and because the purpose is so serious, the story must be accurate–that is, the writer must believe in it, in his heart. So it is history, and since it deals with the evolution of institutions, as well as war and conquest, it is peculiarly instructive history to us.

Ike never needlessly grudged time for a photo session, but he did insist that meetings with individual academics should have a specific and useful purpose. He did on one occasion observe that his academic colleagues tended “to need more time to come to the point than people in the Army,” and he went on the record with this definition of an intellectual: “A man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows.

Descartes’ dictum: ‘There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.