At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.

The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

one of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.

Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.

Whether you are religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer no more.

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.

I have always regarded the development of the individual as the only legitimate goal of education.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

Unlike wealth, there is an infinite value in legacy.

Cheap jewelry, however, is worse than no jewelry at all, and there are very few things in life than are worse than no jewelry at all.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

If you're not willing to work, you're never going to be able to experience the American Dream.

Only a fool wants a confrontation and only a fool wants a strike.

No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human".

The market has no morality

The piano has been drinking, not me.