You have to pay so much to see theater, even in Chicago. In the Greek theater, you didn't have to pay anything. You actually had to go, and you just sat there all day.

Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.

We are lucky in the United States to have our liberal arts system. In most countries, if you go to university, you have to decide for all English literature or no literature, all philosophy or no philosophy. But we have a system that is one part general education and one part specialization. If your parents say you've got to major in computer science, you can do that. But you can also take general education courses in the humanities, and usually you have to.

The humanities teach us the value, even for business, of criticism and dissent. When there's a culture of going along to get along, where whistleblowers are discouraged, bad things happen and businesses implode.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

As human beings, we ought to be vulnerable. We shouldn't try to say that we can be self-sufficient or do everything that's necessary for a good life on our own, because we need other people.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.