Date: March 24, 2011

"It [neurology] has all the fascination of a horror story--the Jekyll of the mind bound for life to the Hyde of the brain."

— McGinn, Colin (b. 1950)

Date: September 2, 2011

"When we fight an urge, it feels like a strenuous effort, as if there were a homunculus in the head that physically impinged on a persistent antagonist."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The 'will' in willpower is not some mysterious 'free will,' a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: September 2, 2011

"The disasters reveal a limitation of the muscle metaphor: certain evolutionarily prepared drives seem to withstand even the most bulked-up powers of will."

— Pinker, Steven (b. 1954)

Date: May 20, 2013

"As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter."

— Paglia, Camille (b. 1947)

Date: April 18, 2016

"We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)

Date: April 18, 2016

"Lucinda, when I finally forced her to start watching, correctly told me to stop bitching about the dragons: they were part of the deal, the price of voluntarily lowering oneself into the pit of the brain."

— James, Clive (b. 1939)