A life in words

  • Choice, Compulsion, Popular Opinion, and the Public Interest

    Choice Relative to our own capability to act, believe, intend, or feel in various ways, choice is the process by which we actually do act, believe, intend, and feel. While some in the cognitive sciences feel that our choices may be entirely a product of chemical processes and circumstance, most people believe at some level…

  • Choose

    There comes a point for all of us where we simply have to make a decision: either we choose the flat, gray neutrality of belieflessness, or we choose to see the world in the dynamic contours of faith. When you believe in nothing—or, rather, when your belief is that there is no right or wrong,…

  • Lemmata

    Shocking fact: computers can’t do everything. I know, I know, all of those years living in delusion. But get up off the floor, it’s not that bad. You see, what a computer can’t do tells us at least as much about the computer as what it can do. Actually, to be more exact, what a…

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech … Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. … A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their freedom of speech. … Freedom of speech is ever the symptom, as well as the effect of a good government. … Guilt only dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its lurking holes, and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight.Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood no. 8, 1722 (orthography and spelling modernized)