I don't miss the obligation to be opinionated, but I do regret the chance to share a joy.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.

A fool thinks he is always right, a wise person always doubts himself.

You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!

A nation will rise no higher than the strength of its homes.

Someday we'll all be gone, but lullabies go on and on / They never die, that's how you and I will be

I'm a very good bowler, which I discovered a few months ago.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

You can't be afraid of hard work or long hours. Sacrifice is important.

We never see ourselves as heroes and sometimes when we do it is a hero that has made a fortune as a clown or a boxer. And there is no lasting value in either one of those.

I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.