When you have children, you realise you can't plan anything. There's no Plan A, no Plan B. Life will happen and you will go with it.
Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion. Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.
It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.
America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.
I think that [Obama] is a powerful leader. I think he’s a brilliant man. I think that he has an incredible devotion to our constitution, and that he is now able to flower more as the president I knew he could be.
The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".
The only thing that happens when I'm teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions.
Nobody knows what will work until they try it. Some of comics' biggest success stories in recent years have explored subjects that no one was writing about at the time - stories no one had any reason to think would succeed. My advice? Write what you want to read. You'll have more fun doing it - and if all else fails, you'll always have at least one loyal reader.