In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility.

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.

If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.

In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man.

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

Arkadia wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her head upon the muscular cliff face he called his chest.

I like to walk a lot and various ideas come in my mind. Many of them I discard.

I've been kind of submerged in my own little geographic location for a really long time in Venice Beach

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

We need grief as a precursor to emotional refreshment, and so consume it vicariously in somewhat titrated but powerful enough form through engagement with the arts.

Play the move that forces the win in the simplest way. Leave the brilliancies to Alekhine, Keres and Tal.

Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance, And toss them on the wheels of Chance.

I was the happiest man in the world, happier than Bill Gates