Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet - which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.

Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.

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

The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.

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.

Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.