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.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

The world invited me many places.

Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

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