Bryan Appleyard

"Scientists need to be observed and criticized more than any other members of society. I say this not just because of the horrors that might emerge from their laboratories, but also because of the necessity for making them as morally and philosophically answerable as the rest of us."

"The whole point I am making is that a hard, irreducible sense of our own self-awareness has been progressively denied us by the inroads of science both as a form and as a creator of our society."

"An adolescent act of defiance has now become a familiar form of virtue. Going with the flow has become an imperative, a clear version of the good life. Change is sentimentally evoked in popular fictions. We change to move on from tragedy or difficulty, we change to overcome trauma, we are frequently told to accept change as some perennial fact of life, the contemplation of which brings wisdom. Virtuous change is the ethic of the soap opera and the ne plus ultra of the advice column."