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

When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.

The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance.