It's not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It's the big-ticket stuff too.

A handkerchief can never be put in another pocket after it has been in one pocket. I don't walk under ladders. I have items of clothing that are lucky for me. That rotates, but I am luck-oriented.

Clearly, there has been a lack of imagination about how much can go wrong.

If you're someone people count on, particularly in difficult moments, that's a sign of a life lived honorably.

I have a file of letters and bits of ephemera from friends who have died. I have had lots of friends who died of AIDS.

Here’s the thing about rights. They’re not actually supposed to be voted on. That’s why they’re called rights.

I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.

Hopefully life is long. Do stuff you will enjoy thinking about and telling stories about for many years to come. Do stuff you will want to brag about.

I really believe in trying to increase the amount of useful information in the world and in being accurate in the sense that you can take what I say to the bank, even if you disagree with me.

Bernie Sanders are the only person who talks about the kinds of things that might be driving people to support Donald Trump in such large numbers in the Republican Party.

Activism is setting a goal of something you would like to be different, and figuring out what would have to change to achieve that goal. It's sort of like math.

Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.

In the middle of tranquillity, think about the people inside the storms! In your happy times, remember the unhappy!

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

I'm a very friendly socialist.

Splitting and gradual divergence of genera is exemplified very well and in a large variety of organisms.

Mum decided that I could sing a bit, so she put me in a choir, which I hated and it was just a nightmare. I was a rebellious sort of choirboy.

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.

The man in between waits between the two, not hearing the lie and not seeing the true. Unknowing what is and denying what seems, and there he will sleep, the man in between.

For the most part, people use God as Santa Claus.

The world should take notice when someone...with a fanatic mind and with powerful means, receives his marching orders from Heaven.