Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.

What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.

Having your husband at a party is like adding anchovies to a salad. I love anchovies, but you can't taste anything else.

To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?

It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.

Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.

-There must be balance. Action and reaction. Chaos and order. Death and life.

I'd rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.

When I come out and sing the first few bars of Bill Bailey, it's very exciting

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

Imitation pleases, because it affords matter for inquiring into the truth or falsehood of imitation, by comparing its likeness or unlikeness with the original.

Influence is the platform God gives you to help others succeed.

The people who change the world never lose hope no matter how bleak the outcome might appear to be.

People do make assumptions about models. That's their issue, not mine. It doesn't bother me because I'm comfortable enough in my own skin - I know who I am.

When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.

Having defeated and then occupied Iraq, democratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower.