Throughout my life I have cared as deeply about the songs of all peoples as I have about the rights of all peoples.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.

By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.

I prefer to make common cause with those whose weapons are guitars, banjos, fiddles and words.

All too often arrogance accompanies strength, and we must never assume that justice is on the side of the strong. The use of power must always be accompanied by moral choice.

But there is a difference here: When Jewish children are murdered, Arabs celebrate the deed. The death of an Arab child is no cause for celebration in Israel.

No doubt unity is something to be desired, to be striven for, but it cannot be willed into being by mere declarations.

After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.

In a general sense, I admit to valuing the worldviews of men under the age of 40 and women over the age of 30.

IT IS QUITE ENOUGH IF A HUMAN BEING HAS BUT ONE FIELD WHERE HE OR SHE IS STRONG. IF A HUMAN BEING WERE STRONG IN EVERY FIELD, IT WOULDN'T BE NICE FOR OTHER PEOPLE, WOULD IT?

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.

The journey of Transformation is a sacred one.

The words of the Buddha offer this truth: ∼ Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed.

The obligation of human beings to support and obey human governments, while they legislate upon the principles of the moral law, is an unalterable as the moral law itself.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of women is responsible for prostitution.

Every little moment has a meaning all its own.

American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.