30 Quotes by Leon Wieseltier

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it.

The world invited me many places.

The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,

American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy,

The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.