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In his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth Jackson relates the first known expression of the "suburban ideal":

"Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust."
— From a letter to the King of Persia, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet in 539 B.C.

Founded in London in 1660, The Royal Society had this commitment to the scientific method they helped establish:

"They have never affirmed anything, concerning the cause, till the trial was past; whereas, to do it before is a most venomous thing in the making of Sciences: for whoever has fixed on his Cause, before he has experimented, can hardly avoid fitting his Experiment and his Observations to his own Cause, which he had before imagined; rather than the Cause to the truth of the Experiment itself."

In his 1993 book, Memories of Summer, Roger Kahn told of a speech given by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey to students at Brooklyn Technical High School during World War II:

"'Undoubtedly, scientists will lead the years to come -- young men very much like yourselves, indeed perhaps your very selves, will be the true rulers of society.' As Rickey spoke, he shook a glass jar containing raisins and nuts. The prop made no sense until Rickey reached his peroration. 'Those who succeed in baseball and in science will first be keen observers and, gentlemen, I hope you have been observing this little jar. Raisins and nuts, nuts and raisins. No matter how many times I shake this jar, as I trust you have observed and marked well for your future, the nuts always come out on top.'"

In 1948, psychologist Bertram R. Forer gave subjects a personality test and then a personality analysis supposedly based on their responses. All subjects, in fact, received the same analysis (assembled from horoscopes), but their average rating of its accuracy for them was 4.26 out of 5. The analysis was:

"You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic."

Big Brother's speech in the 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial:

"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology where each worker may bloom secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thought is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"

In 1990, George Carlin talked about the differences between baseball and football:

"Baseball is different from any other sport in a lot of different little ways. For instance, in most sports, you score points or you score goals; in baseball, you score runs. In most sports, the ball or the object is put in play by the offensive team; in baseball the defense puts the ball in play and only the defensive team is allowed to touch the ball. In fact, in baseball, if an offensive player touches the ball intentionally, he's out."

"Also, most sports, the team is run by a coach; in baseball, the team is run by a manager, and only in baseball does the manager or the coach have to wear the same uniform the players do. Can you picture Bill Parcells in his New York Giants uniform?"

"Now baseball and football are different from one another in other kind of interesting ways, I think. First of all, baseball is a nineteenth century pastoral game; football is a twentieth century technological struggle. Baseball is played on a diamond in a park, the baseball park; football is played on a gridiron in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium. Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life; football begins in the fall when everything is dying. In football, you wear a helmet; in baseball, you wear a cap. Football is concerned with downs: 'What down is it?' Baseball is concerned with ups: 'Who's up? Are you up? I'm not up. He's up!'"

"In football, the specialist comes in to kick; in baseball, the specialist comes in to relieve someone. In football, you receive a penalty; in baseball, you make an error. 'Whoops!' Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, blocking, piling on, late hitting, unnecessary roughness and personal fouls; baseball has the sacrifice."

"Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, sleet, snow, hail, mud, can't read the numbers on the field, can't read the yard markers, can't read the players' numbers; the struggle will continue. In baseball, if it rains, we don't come out to play! 'I can't come out to play, it's raining out!'"

"Baseball has a seventh-inning stretch; football has the two-minute warning. Baseball has no time limit; we don't know when it's going to end, we might have extra innings. Football is rigidly timed and it will end even if we have to go to sudden death."

"In baseball, during the game in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low but there's not that much unpleasantness. In football, in the stands during the game, you can be sure that at least twenty seven times you are perfectly capable of taking the life of a fellow human being. Preferably a stranger."

"And finally, the objectives of the two games are totally different. In football, the object is for the quarterback—otherwise known as the field general—to to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line. In baseball, the object is to go home and to be safe. 'I hope I'll be safe at home! Safe at home!'"

Neal Stephenson's 1999 essay, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, describes a moment on Main Street USA in Disney World's Magic Kingdom:

"Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye, he was watching it on television."

In the 2003 Broadway musical, Wicked, the "Wonderful Wizard of Oz" describes his view of history:

Where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true.
We call it - "history."

A man's called a traitor - or liberator.
A rich man's a thief - or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader - or ruthless invader?
It's all in which label
Is able to persist.
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities,
So we act as though they don't exist.

In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined in 2011, Steven Pinker contends that the level of violence in our world has never been lower:

"A loathing of modernity is one of the great constants of contemporary social criticism; everyone longs to turn back the clock."

"Lamentations of a fall from Eden have a long history in intellectual life...and ever since the 1970s, when romantic nostalgia became the conventional wisdom, statisticians and historians have marshaled facts against it. Our ancestors, they remind us, were infested with lice and parasites and lived above cellars heaped with their own feces. Food was bland, monotonous, and intermittent. Health care consisted of the doctor's saw and the dentist's pliers. Both sexes labored from sunrise to sundown, whereupon they were plunged into darkness. Winter meant months of hunger, boredom, and gnawing loneliness in snowbound farmhouses."

"But it was not just mundane physical comforts that our recent ancestors did without. It was also the higher and nobler things in life, such as knowledge, beauty, and human connection. Everyone was ignorant of the vastness of the cosmos, the prehistory of civilization, the genealogy of living things, the genetic code, the microscopic world, and the constituents of matter and life. Musical recordings, affordable books, instant news of the world, reproductions of great art, and filmed dramas were inconceivable, let alone available in a tool that can fit in a shirt pocket. And then there are modernity's gifts of life itself: the additional decades of existence, the mothers who live to see their newborns, the children who survive their first years on earth." [I live a half-mile from a nineteenth-century cemetery where 12 of 43 markers are for children age two or less.]

"Even with all these reasons why no romantic would really step into a time machine, the nostalgic have always been able to pull out one moral card: the profusion of modern violence. At least, they say, our ancestors did not have to worry about muggings, school shootings, terrorist attacks, holocausts, world wars, killing fields, napalm, gulags, and nuclear annihilation. Surely no Boeing 747, no antibiotic, no iPod is worth the suffering that modern societies and their technologies can wreak."

"And here is where unsentimental history and statistical literacy can change our view of modernity. For they show that nostalgia for a peaceable past is the biggest delusion of all. We now know that native peoples, whose lives are so romanticized in today's children's books, had rates of death from warfare that were greater than those of our world wars. The romantic visions of medieval Europe omit the exquisitely crafted instruments of torture and are innocent of the thirtyfold greater risk of murder in those times. The centuries for which people are nostalgic were times in which the wife of an adulterer could have her nose cut off, a seven-year-old could be hanged for stealing a petticoat, a witch could be sawn in half, and a sailor could be flogged to a pulp. The moral commonplaces of our age, such as that slavery, war, and torture are wrong, would have been seen as saccharine sentimentality, and our notion of universal human rights almost incoherent. Genocide and war crimes were absent from the historical record only because no one at the time thought they were a big deal."

"On top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence. For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor, and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible."