The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

My wife, the star I steer by.

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

We're all suicides. The tragedy is every day that we don't die.

God is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and next life.

No problem is so big and difficult that it can't be blamed on somebody else.

There is beautiful in the grotesque.

When the uncapped potential of a student meets the liberating art of a teacher, a miracle unfolds.

I start out by believing the worst

I have this theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion then it will start a chain reaction of the same.

To kill [children in the womb] makes us all the poorer, insensitive, calloused and jaded.

I hate putting negative energy out into the world. But it's either inside or out. I mean, it's either get an ulcer or have a fight.