To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted.

What is crucial is the provision of opportunities for telling all the diverse stories, for interpreting membership as well as ethnicity, for making inescapable the braids of experience woven into the fabric of America's plurality.

Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.

We go to sea repeatedly from Melville's time on - and the image of men at sea, like the image of men in the wilderness, seems to me to be almost an archetypal image of human beings on their own, human beings making their own way, guiding themselves by the stars they can see - rather than by faith or prayer or invisible forces.

The arts, it has been said, cannot change the world, but they may change human beings who might change the world.

Part of teaching is helping people create themselves.

To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted.