It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. ... Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.

Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.

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.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.

Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.