“Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room,”

If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors.

Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually.

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world?

Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT magic.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don’t hear them whinging.

Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed.

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

Define yourself by what you love.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours.

We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs.

Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid and damaging idea.

You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? – Medicine.

Only a ginger, can call another ginger Ginger.

How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?

Science is not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief.

Poems are not easy to start, and they’re not easy to finish. There’s a great pleasure in – I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started.

Well we’re waiting here in Allentown For the Pennsylvania we never found For the promises our teachers gave If we worked hard If we behaved So the graduations hang on the wall But they never really helped us at all No they never taught us what was real.

God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all suffering will cease.

When I was here there was still a requirement that students had to swim 50 yards to graduate…because Harry Elkins Widener had drowned with the sinking of the Titanic. And it made me very grateful at the time that he had not gone down in a plane crash.

If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.

But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.

But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.