I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.

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

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

How do people know they are sane? Can a person be gripped by lunacy, only to be released a short time later, never to relive the episode again?

People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite.

I have been under assault by the liberal media in the United States.

The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.

The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful.

Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.

No matter what Donald Trump says, he has deep socialist leanings. He's a nationalist and a populist. And throughout history, whenever you combine those three things it never ends well.

I am a hole in a flute that the Christ's breath moves through. Listen to this music.

He who has suffered you to impose on him knows you.

Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.