Whitehouse disappeared into ignominy. William Thomson ended up being knighted and later elevated to a baron by Queen Victoria. He became Lord Kelvin … - Neal Stephenson

Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.