Reading Is A Technology For Perspective-taking. When

The Rights Revolutions Too Have Given Us Ideals That Educated People Today Take For Granted But That Are Virtually Unprecedented In Human History, Such As That People Of All Races And Creeds Have Equal Rights, That Women Should Be Free From All Forms Of Coercion, That Children Should Never, Ever Be Spanked, That Students Should Be Protected From Bullying, And That There’s Nothing Wrong With Being Gay. I Don’t Find It At All Implausible That These Are Gifts, In Part, Of A Refined And Widening Application Of Reason.

An Enormous Amount Of Scientific Language Is Metaphorical. We Talk About A Genetic Code, Where Code Originally Meant A Cipher; We Talk About The Solar System Model Of The Atom As Though The Atom Were Like A Sun And Moon And Planets.

Democracy Is An Imperfect Way Of Steering Between The Violence Of Anarchy And The Violence Of Tyranny, With The Least Violence You Can Get Away With.

The Idea That Children Are Passive Repositories To Be Shaped By Their Parents Has Been Massively Overstated. A Child's Peer Group Is A Far Greater Determinant Of Its Development And Achievements Than Parental Aspiration.

Look At Almost Any Passage, And You'll Find That A Paragraph Has Five Or Six Metaphors In It. It's Not That The Speaker Is Trying To Be Poetic, It's Just That That's The Way Language Works.