“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

And a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

All this happened, more or less.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, ‘Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency’.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

My life is nothing but room for you. I said. It could never be filled by anyone but you.

We’d been apart so long-I’d been dead so long, she said in English. I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

Climate change poses an existential threat to the planet that is no less dire than that posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life.

Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.

Angels on earth exist I know it.

Racism exists, but it is far less rampant than ignorance, and ignorance can be cured through experience.

The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated.