"Men ought to become more conscious of their bodies as objects of delight."

“I am for peace, retrenchment and reform, the watchword of the great Liberal Party thirty years ago.”

Source : Speech on April 28, 1859. The Times, p. 6, April 29, 1859.

“No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.”

“Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.”

“A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.”

Source : "Interview: Clive Thompson's 'Smarter Than You Think'". Interview with Michael Agger, www.newyorker.com. October 29, 2013.

“Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.”

“I am big into water sports and just being out on the water. That is second nature to me, being from Florida.”

“Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.”

“When people tell you to walk a certain way, it's like not thinking of a purple tomato. You can't not do it.”