We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of the country.

Where we choose to put our attention changes our brain, which in time can change how we see and interact with the world.

We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.

As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period when this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.

If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you come back again and again.

Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality.