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.

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

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.

Always remember that the tales of another are never as wondrous as your own.

Love, Cough, & a Smoke, can't well be hid.

Do you know what an unwanted bodily condition is? It's a freshly hatched energy-summoning life-giving desire!

I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.

If I wouldn't have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.

Time,--the most independent of all things.

Christianity founds hospitals and atheists are cured in them, never knowing they owe their cure to Christ.