“Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.”

“I think the most important leadership lessons I've learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many...”

“When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core...”

“I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle - for travel and for procuring a book in s...”

“The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equi...”

“The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible,...”

“If you want, you can be a child for the rest of your life and be a great LEARNER”

“The eternal child. - We think that play and fairy tales belong to childhood:how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time of life tolive without play and fairy tales! We give these ...”

“one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”

“When the people whom we love the most leave us, we start learning to live with the shadows they have left inside us.”

“The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.”