“It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.”

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.

The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

That’s the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.

Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.

In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.

I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.

The secret of the truly successful … is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

The power of the world always works in circles.

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.

You guys pair up in groups of three, then line up in a circle.

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.

I’ve been lucky with the circle of people I’m playing with. We’ve played enough that there’s a language we talk with each other when we play.

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.