People like to feel entitled, whether they're actually entitled or not.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Even as I speak, the very last polar bear may be dying of hunger on account of climate change, on account of us. And I sure miss the polar bears. Their babies are so warm and cuddly and trusting, just like ours.

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

Well, there was stuff going on, heroic events. One was what used to be, and probably still is, the largest moving project in history. The headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company used to be brick. What they did was take the old brick building - with the operators in there saying, "Number please" and all that - and they put it through a quarter of a turn and moved it half a block!

The hopes and fears of all our years are here with us tonight.

I am of course a skeptic about the divinity of Christ and a scorner of the notion that there is a God who cares how we are or what we do.