. . .
Some of the greatest aphorisms are American — notably those of Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, to whom we owe a definition of the brain (“an apparatus with which we think we think”) that ought to be inscribed above the entrance to every department of neuroscience.
. . .
A degree in the humanities should have something of the ancient study of rhetoric. It should be equipping students to persuade, to use language gracefully and succinctly, and to speak and write with style. Persuasion comes not through statistics and theories, but through the artful aphorism that summarizes, in the heart of the listeners, the things that they suspect but don’t yet know.
–Roger Scruton
