All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

Israel today is bad for the Jews.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee.The teevee debilitates our culture.

If you try to hide a star behind a dark veil, it will still shine through it.

When mom died, my old roommate, Jimmy, said that in an alternate dimension, an alternate me might have a worse life.Now that's comforting, said Murphy.

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to his Word, to offer themselves to God.

I tend to lose myself in the moment. I’m not very good at holding back. I don’t know how to do this without feeling everything. My emotions are the tool I use to perform.

If you’re not eating the right foods in the right amounts, all the exercise in the world won’t combat the caloric intake.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

The consciousness of good intention is the greatest solace of misfortunes.

Pity's akin to love; and every thought Of that soft kind is welcome to my soul.