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 forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.

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.

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

Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -Andrew Young, author, civil rights activist, US congressman, mayor, and UN ambassador (b. 1932)

A mystical symphony permeates my senses and a holy lullaby embraces me.

A member must say that he is a member of the Unification Church and that he is the follower of Sun Myung Moon. If he doesn't have the courage to say it, he is not worthy of me.

Gaining insight into one's underlying motives, it seems, is more like a belief conversion than a self-discovery process

Anyone who says he wants to be a writer and isn't writing, doesn't.

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

In 2002, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of colon cancer. And it was such a shock, a surprise to us.

So in many ways for me, having lived through what I've lived through, and endured what I've endured, I've got more confidence that I can do the next bit - and there's something sustaining about that.

Golf is social. It brings a lot of people together. And the great thing about a scramble, there's less pressure because you don't feel like every shot has to be your shot.

We imagine that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord, "I *delight* to do Thy will, O My God.