Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

I bought salvation from a man on the street. He said, "Go down to the beach and let the waves wash your feet.

The redistribution of wealth creates dependence on the people to whom it is redistributed, it doesn't incentivize them to create their own wealth.

It’s important to me that people hear my music on its own merit and not in relation to another project I’ve done. Ultimately, the music has its own energy and message and stands on its own.

I’m sort of like Costco. I’m big, I’m not fancy and I dare you to not like me.

[Washington is a] very gossipy little village of people all going to the same bars . . . all watching each other having affairs with each other

Young atheists abound, but old atheists are rare.

Time goes by slowly when you spend it waiting.

The gym is somewhere you can go to just forget for an hour what you do for a living, what you are doing on a daily basis. You just turn up and get on with it.

When you reduce what you need in life to the bare minimum, then that's when you achieve true freedom.

We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.