For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through Hayek's masterpieces "The Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" that I really came to think this principle as having wider application.
I cannot find a faithful message-bearer," he wrote to his friend, the scholar Atticus. "How few are they who are able to carry a rather weighty letter without lightening it by reading.
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film. Some films can, but not too much.
Now musing o'er the changing scene Farmers behind the tavern screen Collect; with elbows idly press'd On hob, reclines the corner's guest, Reading the news to mark again The bankrupt lists or price of grain. Puffing the while his red-tipt pipe He dreams o'er troubles nearly ripe, Yet, winter's leisure to regale, Hopes better times, and sips his ale.
Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive atthe precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.
...as parents, we have to find the time and the energy to step in and help our children love reading. We can read to them, talk to them about what they're reading, and make time for this by turning off the television set ourselves. Libraries are a critical tool to help parents do this.
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.