Associate's Mind

  I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. [...]

  Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, famed British Prime Minister during World War II, was not only a noted statesman, but also a gifted student of oration and history. Churchill wrote numerous pieces on history, the English language, and how to develop the skills necessary to develop a mastery of rhetoric. So gifted was Churchill that he [...]

I had enrolled in The School of Life, an academy of “self-help” on Bloomsbury’s Marchmont Street, co-founded by philosopher Alain de Botton. For about £30 per session, students can take classes with resident “fellows” of the school on subjects such as “How to fill the God-shaped hole” or “How to make love last”. Tuesday’s topic [...]

Via the Legal Writing Prof Blog: Although calendars have changed over time, the date on which King John signed Magna Carta was June 15, 1215. So today we can celebrate its 796th anniversary! In the history of legal writing, Magna Carta is, as its name suggests, a document of great significance. It memorializes an absolute monarch’s agreement to [...]

Today is a red letter day…for science. Nearly 60 years ago, James D. Watson and Francis Crick introduced the modern concept of the double helix formation of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). On this very same day, the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, which identified and mapped the approximately 20,000–25,000 genes of the human genome. [...]

A quick note: I think I’ve exhausted all I can extract from Plutarch’s  Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. While I was tempted to skip around a bit and maybe hit something a bit further along (St. Thomas Aquinas? John Stuart Mill?), but decided I wanted to at least stick around Roman History long [...]

And in fact Sertorius is said to have been of a temper unassailable either by fear or pleasure, in adversity and dangers undaunted, and noways puffed up with prosperity. In straightforward fighting, no commander in his time was more bold and daring, and in whatever was to be performed in war by stratagem, secrecy, or surprise, [...]

For he was a sincere lover of his country, and had a great desire to return home; but in his adverse fortune he showed undaunted courage, and behaved himself towards his enemies in a manner free from all dejection and mean-spiritedness; and when he was in his prosperity, and in the height of his victories, [...]

Laughing at his own son, who got his mother, and, by his mother’s means, his father also, to indulge him, he told him that he had the most power of any one in Greece: “For the Athenians command the rest of Greece, I command the Athenians, your mother commands me, and you command your mother.” [...]

For Tiberius, maintaining an honourable and just cause, and possessed of eloquence sufficient to have made a less creditable action appear plausible, was no safe or easy antagonist, when,  with the people crowding around the hustings, he took his place, and spoke  in behalf of the poor. “The savage beasts,” said he, “in Italy, have their particular [...]