God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.

Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.

The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

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

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.