The rise of Islam offers perhaps the most impressive example in world history of the power of words to alter human behavior in sudden, surprising ways.

The intellectual power, through words and things,Went sounding on a dim and perilous way!

In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.

We have to do the best we can with the language and concepts we inherit and not worry about obtaining a truth that will satisfy everyone, everywhere, and for all time

"Muscular bonding" is the most economical label I could find for this phenomenon, and I hope the phrase will be understood to mean the euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses among nearly all participants in such exercises.

We have an enormous fixation on, what seems to me to be, the naïve idea that truth resides in what somebody wrote sometime in the past. If it's not written down, it isn't true. And that's absurd. But it's the way historians are trained: you have to have a source, and if you don't have something you can cite from an original source, in the original language, then you're not a really good historian, you're are not scientific, you're not true .