That which is dead, or corrupted; or excerned, hath antipathy with the same thing when it is alive and sound, and with those parts which do excern.

We now have good reason to question the pursuits of the vaunted innovators with whom Liu consorted in California – the blissed-out cultists at Google, whose only worry is over “the wrong kind of sparkling water in the microkitchens”, or the manic experts who specialise in “envisioning hyperplanes in n-dimensional space”.

The slowth may have been caused by various software issues rather than anything to do with hardware.

Hume's pacificity and neutrality contrast with Gibbon's combative attitude and his interest in subjective, personalized experience.