Quoted: Allegory fell on hard times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the charm of beloved works of English literature such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the imaginative use of allegory, biblical scholars banished the term from their vocabulary. Harper’s Bible Dictionary, for example, published in the 1980s by leading scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature, does not even have an entry under the word.

This is a detailed Atlantic article from 1870.

Quoted: The Tibetan lama listened respectfully to the Jesuit priest and replied, "Your religion is the same as ours."

Quoted: Edward Said's shadowy legacy Robert Irwin TLS

Quoted: That's why I'm skeptical of people who look at some catastrophic failure of a complex system and say, "Wow, the odds of this happening are astronomical. Five different safety systems had to fail simultaneously!" What they don't realize is that one or two of those systems are failing all the time, and it's up to the other three systems to prevent the failure from turning into a disaster. You never see a news story that says "A gas refinery did not explode today because simultaneous failures in the first, second, fourth, and fifth safety systems did not lead to a disaster thanks to a correctly-functioning third system." The role of the failure and the savior may change over time, until eventually all of the systems choose to have a bad day all on the same day, and something goes boom.

Quoted: When a professor invents a machine that writes books, and then uses that machine to write more than 200,000 different books, there arises the question, ...

Quoted: To adults who play sophisticated games regularly (such as those over at the Guardian's Gamesblog) it is an old contention that video games can be ...

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