A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

It is wrong to be dependent on the body-complex [pudgal]. One should depend only on the Soul.

The heart knows not of distance, space nor time. It meshes to the fabric of its desire & follows on an immeasurable continuum.

The sweetness of reunion is the joy of heaven.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

You know, I'm a skinny Irish guy.

We have forgotten what rocks and plants still know - we have forgotten how to be - to be still - to be ourselves - to be where life is here and now

President George W. Bush is endangering the United States and the world's safety while undermining American values.

Half-man, half-beast, all nightmare. The shapeshifter warrior form.

In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.

You don't know what people are really like until they're under a lot of stress.