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

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 couldn’t help wondering what it was that made me not good enough. It was a familiar feeling. I’d had it off and on my entire life.

Books aren't just booksthey're a completely different worldin the palm of your hands

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

One is more admired for claiming to do good than for proving to be right.

In church I feel very close to the publican of the parable.

In this country, we not only have a right to vote, we have a right to know who we can vote for.

Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter.

If Donald Trump shows signs of backing out of Europe, the Russians might be willing to stay out of his confrontation with Iran. If he follows Obama's program in Europe, things might be different.

I wonder if I could make an electric bass.

In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history.... We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.