The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.

That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.

Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.

More powerful than the will to win is the courage to begin.

We call this a sweet life

"Glamour" is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way mentally and physically and in appearance and that whatever the occasion or the situation you are equal to it.

Please will you do my job for me.

Friends, I was pretty sure, lift their friends up; they don't weigh them down like a sack full of stones

Leaders must be released from the idea that they must be great prayer warriors before they can begin to call others to prayer.

Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.

The only goal right now that I can have, the only thing I can offer right now, is the need to get good at music, do something with quality.

No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.