There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.