Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

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

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.

An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

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