Peter Brown

“There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar. It could not have been difficult to notice that the Sun rises every morning in more or less the same direction, that during the day one can tell how much time there is before night from the height of the Sun in the sky, and that hot weather will follow the time of year when the day lasts longest.”
― Steven Weinberg, To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

“And in yet another unsung accomplishment, the poorest of the poor—the unsheltered homeless—fell in number between 2007 and 2015 by almost a third, despite the Great Recession.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“How do people regain control when their animal brains are stuck in a fight for survival? If what goes on deep inside our animal brains dictates how we feel, and if our body sensations are orchestrated by subcortical (subconscious) brain structures, how much control over them can we actually have?”
― Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma