But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.

The world invited me many places.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.