“We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean.”

“The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.”

“The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable”

“First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.”

“We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches.”

“The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth.”

“Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.”