Religion isn’t about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

The more aggressive our ideologies become, the more aggressive our discourse whether it's in the United States, from Washington D.C., or whether it's from Tehran, or from some underground Al-Qaeda cell. The more aggressive that discourse is, the more people of moderate persuasion have to organize and speak a voice of compassion. That means to feel with the other.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God’s existence.

And sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

Geniuses are not always pleasant people.

I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.