“A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sens...”

“My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.”

“I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.”

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”

“I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.”

“When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.”

“It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.”

“I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.”

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”