I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!

How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

We are capitalism made flesh.

We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.

All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

I didn't burn down anyone’s house! I didn’t. I wouldn’t!”Maddie looked at Jacob.“You know I wouldn’t. I didn’t kill you when I had the chance!

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

[I'm] more German than Irish.

I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers. Our brain does that sometimes. Or at least mine does.

I hope the film will help mothers and fathers to be aware that 15 is a very vulnerable age.

The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life

Things have become devalued to the point where people don't realize the repercussions, that they're devaluing themselves. It could end up bringing about chaos, a lawless situation.

Pete Rose is baseball.

Investment must be rational; if you can't understand it, don't do it.

I believe in conscientious capitalism; that's a kind of driving force with me.