"In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites."

"Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us."

"In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being."

"There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?"

"I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question."

"According to a recent poll [...] 94% of Americans agree that "people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty."

"I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall."

"I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion."

"At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame."

"To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort."

"You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man."

"We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s preeminent democracy, after all, if the large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."

"The religions that fascinate me and, you know, could possibly tempt me are not the ones that involve faith or belief. They're the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity."

"You still don't like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don't marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved."

"Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about."

"Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss."

"D’Artagnan: Why is Athos sitting by himself? Aramis: He takes his drinking very seriously. Not to worry, he’ll be his usual charming self by morning."

"Toil and risk are the price of glory, but it is a lovely thing to live with courage and die leaving an everlasting fame."

"Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies."

"I would rather live a short life of glory than a long one of obscurity."

"With the right attitude, self imposed limitations vanish"

"My father will anticipate everything. He will leave you and me no chance to do a great and brilliant deed."

"Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them."

"So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius' wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty."