I completely can't understand people of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it's right.

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.

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

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

If you can't love yourself, how can you love others?

You get used to... what you want to get used to.

Without trials and tribulation, there would be no hero. Without a hero, there would be no story. Without a story, there is no life as life is made up of vignettes of loving, learning and overcoming.

If the community wish to have the benefit of more knowledge and intelligence in the labouring classes, it must dispense it at the public charge.

I guess I was a philosophical child.

... sometimes good people [are] helpless... terrible things happen... to good people... there [are] sad endings as well as happy ones.

Minor artists borrow, great ones steal.

Both [Donald] Trump and Hillary [Clinton] want bigger military budgets and Hillary supports President Obama's one trillion dollar expenditure to so-called upgrade nuclear weapons. P

Very simple ideas lie within the reach only of complex minds.

Why are you so enchanted by this world, when a mine of gold lies within you?