Religious education is only valuable intellectually, if the child is educated in a religion versus [just] about a religion. I don't believe you can have both.

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.

Afterlife exist in the unidentified substances.

a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.

None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

Vaclav Havel is the figure that represents the Velvet Revolution and the reunification of Europe. He will be sorely missed.

Rock is so much fun. That's what it's all about - filling up the chest cavities and empty kneecaps and elbows.

I always try to do the most interesting, fun thing for me.

I'm confident that it is with the strength of the poor that India will move forward.

The powers that be in entertainment are really threatening anybody that shows up at the [Donald] Trump inauguration is gonna have trouble getting a job. They're ticked off.