How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

We are capitalism made flesh.

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

The purpose of life is to live it being self-aware in the eternal now with its infinite versions of us. It is about living our dreams, and not just dreaming about living them one day.

We now doubt Aristotle, understand Shakespeare only with footnotes.

Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball is like talking to Homer about the Gods.

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last.

MGM never really gave me a break. They loaned me out for leading roles, but cast me in programme pictures.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection admits a sacrifice.

Our thoughts are free.