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

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

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

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

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

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

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.