I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon.

I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.