The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.

The struggle for a free intelligence has always been a struggle between the ironic and the literal mind.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

The fact is: It's true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.