I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Being strong means that you are made of steel.

Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.

Assessments should compare the performance of students to a set of expectations, never to the performance of other students.

I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

I'm a firm believer in shades of gray.

I consider myself a 3-D philosopher. I am not a designer at all. I studied aerodynamics, I studied philosophy, I studied sculpture. High technology on one side, and on the other side, art.

Any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up.

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.