“in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm – a bland and neutral mainstream – from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.”

Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.

Consider the standard two-person married couple. … They will share a VCR, a microwave, etc. This is not a matter of ideology or even personal inclination. It is practically the definition of marriage. Marriage is socialism among two people.

Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.

The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?

For a long time on Earth humans didn’t worship good gods; that’s a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don’t want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I’ll read about it.

if you search the bible, you will find no reference to birth control or gay marriage, and you will not find a word, strangely, about stem cell research. I have searched.

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles…bot h of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.

They say time will make all this go away. But it’s time that has taken my tomorrows and turned them into yesterdays.

Practically everything from hairstyles to lifestyles is endorsed as some sort of drug to be taken Now for Instant Relief.

I’ve done a bit of live action before but the fight sequences, the wire work and the physical regime were taken to another level [ in Doctor Strange].

If you take out of your statutes, your constitution, your family life all that is taken from the Sacred Book, what would there be left to bind society together?

It is one thing being able to contest an election and to give the people hope that I can be the next prime minister. It is a totally different situation where the people of Pakistan are told that the results are already taken and the leader of your choice is banned.

I feel as if I’m in on a pass and am damn lucky to have whatever I have. It could all be taken away in a second.

Tis no sin love’s fruits to steal; But the sweet thefts to reveal; To be taken, to be seen, These have crimes accounted been.