The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don't become inured to what they are shown — if that's the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.