Date: 2007

"Books externalize our brains, and turn our homes into thinking bodies."

— Updike, John (1932-2009)

Date: August 5, 2009

"That reminds me of a wonderful quote from a professional cartoonist who also teaches a university level course on comedy, who said he thought of 'humour as a necessary counterweight to the hegemony of reason.'"

— Bhalla, Jag

Date: June 1, 2010

"Anyone who's closely read Mr. Hitchens's work -- including his best-selling manifesto 'God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' (2007) -- or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments ...

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)

Date: June 1, 2010

"His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew."

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)

Date: March 10, 2011

"Richards’s sharpness is surprising coming from a guy whose mind, everyone had to assume, was by now a salvage heap."

— Chiasson, Dan

Date: September 2, 2011

"When we fight an urge, it feels like a strenuous effort, as if there were a homunculus in the head that physically impinged on a persistent antagonist."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The 'will' in willpower is not some mysterious 'free will,' a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: October 7, 2011

"In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author's mind seem to be laid plain on the paper."

— Horowitz, Alexandra