The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members it must inevitably fall to pieces.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

Therefore a person should first be changed by a teacher's instructions and guided by principles of ritual. Only then can he observe the rules of courtesy and humility obey the conventions and rules of society and achieve order.

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Right now I'm following the Buddhist principle: Smile as abuse is hurled your way and this too shall pass.

Science is based on the possibility of objectivity on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories.

It was a shock to people of the nineteenth century when they discovered from observations science had made that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.