The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)
Context: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.
Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book
“Anyone who can think clearly can write clearly. But neither is easy.”
The Business of Life (1949)
Introduction, p. vii.
On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976)
“The ability to write reflects on one’s capacity to think clearly.”
Facebook post, https://www.facebook.com/GovernorMigunaMiguna/posts/562705787252139, 2016
2016
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 24 (p. 143)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
42 min 33 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Letter to Thomas Jefferson (15 July 1817)
1810s
Source: The Languages of Pao (1958), Chapter 8 (p. 64)
