Mankind accepts good fortune as his due, but when bad occurs, he thinks it was aimed at him, done to him, a hex, a curse, a punishment by his deity for some transgression, as though his god were a petty storekeeper, counting up the day's receipts.

Other people's risks are statistical. When it's your risk, your own child, it isn't statistical anymore.

It may be important to write a book that doesn't come up to what I would like to have rather than to write no book at all.

The practice of diplomacy, I have found, is sometimes like eating soup with a fork: much activity yielding little nourishment.

Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.

I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.

We live in a time like dreaming.... The edges of our lives flutter and change as we watch them. Listen to the dream.