I'd be the last person in the world to deny that there are many people for whom faith is - can be a great sustaining force.

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.

I got put on jury duty, which is where I learned how to write.

Love is a process in which ego is lost and infinity is experienced.

My mother isn't crazy. She simply has a harder time than most reconciling her reality with everyone else's reality.

Dandelions don't tell no lies.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

There is no fortune so good that you can find nothing in it to complain of.

I live my life with a lot of integrity based on what I want for my life and who I am.

By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don't ordinarily call upon in your personal life.

I got a garage door opener. It can't close. Just open.

Whatever it is about pictures, photographs, it's just about impossible to follow up with words. They don't have anything to do with each other.