What is there greater than the word which persuades the judges in the courts, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly?
ARISTOTLE from Rhetoric 177
And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things.
AUGUSTINE from On Christian Doctrine 184
I think that there is hardly a single eloquent man who can both speak well and think of the rules of eloquence while he is speaking.
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ from La Respuesta 189
But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen. . . . had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more.
WAYNE BOOTH The Rhetorical Stance 198
The common ingredient that I find in all of the writing I admire—excluding for now novels, plays and poems—is something that I shall reluctantly call the rhetorical stance.
GLORIA ANZALDUA How to Tame a Wild Tongue 205
If you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.
TONI MORRISON Nobel Lecture 217
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; it does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI Networked Politics from Tahrir to Taksim: Is There a Social Media-Fueled Protest Style? 225
It is [. . .] easier to use social media to communicate a message or an image of refusal or dissent rather than convey complicated arguments.
THE ARTS 233
MO TZU Against Music 236
If you ask what it is that has caused the ruler to neglect the affairs of government and the humble man to neglect his tasks, the answer is music.
BOETHIUS from Of Music 242
There can be no doubt that the unity of our body and soul seems to be somehow determined by the same proportions that join together and unite the harmonious inflections of music.
LADY MURASAKI SHIKIBU On the Art of the Novel 248
The novel is . . . not, as is usually supposed, a mixture of useful truth with idle invention, but something which at every stage and at every part has a definite and serious purpose.
0 JOHANNES VERMEER Study of a Young Woman 253
A painting of a young, unknown model by one of the greatest Dutch masters.
EDMUND BURKE from The Sublime and Beautiful 256
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers . . . as fear.
0 WILLIAM BLAKE The Tyger 262
What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
LEO TOLSTOY from What Is Art? 265
Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
ALICE WALKER Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self 271
I realize I have dashed about the world madly, looking at this, looking at that, storing up images against the fading of the light. But I might have missed seeing the desert!
ELAINE SCARRY from On Beauty and Being Just 279
One day I ran into a friend, and when he asked me what I was doing, I said I was trying to explain how beauty leads us to justice.
0 LISA YUSKAVAGE Babie I 286
A painting of a woman holding wilted flowers and looking off into the distance.
SCIENCE AND NATURE 289
LUCRETIUS from De Rerum Natura 292
I'd have you know / That while these particles come mostly down / Straight down of their own weight through the void, at times / No one knows when or where— they swerve a little.
MATSUO BASHO The Narrow Road to the Interior 300
Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
0 JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump 308
A painting of a science experiment in eighteenth-century England depicts various reactions to the scientific revolution.
WILLIAM PALEY from Natural Theology 311
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever.
CHARLES DARWIN from Natural Selection; or, the Survival of the Fittest 314
It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.
RACHEL CARSON The Obligation to Endure 328
The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. . . . Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
KARL POPPER from Science as Falsification 336
A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
BARRY COMMONER The Four Laws of Ecology 344
In the woods around Walden Pond or on the reaches of the Mississippi, most of the information needed to understand the natural world can be gained by personal experience. In the world of nuclear bombs, smog, and foul water, environmental understanding needs help from the scientist.
EDWARD O. WILSON The Fitness of Human Nature 356
What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find ready expression.
WANGARI MAATHAI Foresters without Diplomas 363
Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it, because educated people are in a position to understand what is being lost.
VANDANA SHIVA from Soil, Not Oil 374
Earth Democracy allows us to break free of the global supermarket of commodifi- cation and consumerism, which is destroying our food, our farms, our homes, our towns, and our planet.
LAW AND GOVERNMENT 381
LAO TZU from the Tao Te Ching 384
The more restrictive the laws, the poorer the people.
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN from The Treasure of the City of Ladies 397
Although the prince may be lord and master of his subjects, the subjects nevertheless make the lord and not the lord the subjects.