The reason that people in the intellectual community argue that football is dangerous is because there's now a large swath of society that has no relationship to physicality or potential violence.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

I used to watch a lot of documentaries about Satanic possession - and I don't know if this is racist or not - but in the documentaries, it never happened to Americans! It was always happening in Central America or South America; that's where the priest was always going down to exorcise possessed people. So I didn't have a lot of fear of being possessed by the devil.

You can't go into the office and be a jerk. You can't yell at your kids or your wife or your husband for no reason. That makes you a terrible person.

If I basically view criticism as sort of an interesting form of writing about oneself, an interesting form of autobiography, then I don't feel any pressure to have any kind of authoritative, universal voice. That kind of thing has never interested me.

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.