A wall of books is a wall of windows.

What matters to me is that one identifies one’s genuine obsessions, one’s genuine commitments, one’s genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

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

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.

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

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

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

The world invited me many places.

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.