One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy ‘legacy’ is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and “torch-passing” rhetoric in general.
It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
It’s normally agreed that the question ‘How are you?’ doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.
I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.
Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
You don’t say ‘they all do it’ unless you know you’ve been doing it too.
The beauty of science hugely outranks the charms of superstition.
Of course, I do everything for money.
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.
The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.
Chemotherapy isn’t good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, ‘Well that is a good thing because it’s supposed to be poison. If it’s making the tumor feel this queasy, then I’m OK with it.’
With modern American dentistry it is simply amazing to see what transformation can be wrought in a single day.
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven’t elected a new one. There’s no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don’t miss it.
No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It’s a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
Doubt, skepticism, innovation, and inquiry are the only means by which wonder, beauty, awe, and symmetry will be discovered.
I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.