The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization

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.

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

With God, anything that stands against you will always be inferior to what resides within you.

[W]ishing for immortality won't make life last any longer.

You are the one who takes the peace away from yourself. You are the one who’s harming yourself.

There is no such thing called 'Luck'. Your luck takes the shape as you want to see it.

The world doesn’t owe you anything. You have to work for everything you get and you have to appreciate every bit of success the world gives you.

We who are immortal, we are chained to this life by a chain of gold, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop.

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Don't rely on logic alone, nor speculation. Don't infer or be deceived by appearances.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.