Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

You're the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.

I argue for a relational conception of the person as a basis for an environmental ethic that can encourage us to preserve the environment not solely on the basis of satisfying human interests and not solely because we might attribute intrinsic value to the environment, but because the environment is something with which we can potentially enter into constructive relationship, as part of what makes us who we are or transform who we are and open us up to new interests.

The Confucians paid a great deal attention to ritual, highlighting the ones that expressed the sorts of affective attitudes one wants to cultivate, engaging in them with keen awareness of their value for shaping and reshaping the self, and insisting on the need to be emotionally present to their significance for one's relationship to others. If we Americans want to rebuild our capacities for a shared life, we would do well to pay attention to all this.

I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.

War is about remaking the world to suit the whims of some powerful group over the whims of some other powerful group. The dead are just the sparks that fly from the metal as they grind it down.

... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.