“What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.”

“Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”

“What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.”

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is ...”

“It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and ...”

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

“So he was queer, E.M. Forster. It wasn't his middle name (that would be 'Morgan'), but it was his orientation, his romping pleasure, his half-secret, his romantic passion. In the long-suppressed no...”

“Washington was no politician as we understand the word," replied Ratcliffe abruptly. "He stood outside of politics. The thing couldn't be done today. The people don't like that sort of royal airs.”

“The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go together.”

“Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothin...”

“When I opened the box, I had to remove myself from whose handwriting it was that I was reading and whose story I was hearing. I had to, or I never would have made it past the first letter. If I sto...”

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts like a Chinese nest of boxes oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front in our ancestors, back and back until...”

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. Thats the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately aft...”

“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian Id been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregation...”

“I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from ...”