Words&Dirt

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

––All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, pg. 328

“The rise of a popular press and of working-class literacy made it increasingly clear––and, as democratic sentiment grew, increasingly unacceptable––that gentlemen were living outside the law. When dueling was an aristocratic practice known mostly only within the class of those who practiced it, there was no place for the attitudes of ordinary people to shape its honor world. The modern press brought all the citizens of Britain into a single community of knowledge and evaluation.”

––The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, pg. 38