“Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we're here for something else besides ourselves.”

“So the greatest source of happiness is other people--and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house, and if we're really wealthy, to an estate. We think we're moving up, but really we're walling off ourselves.”

“The epitome of culture is the search for truth, or at least a reasonable approximation of reality, most notably the need to know ourselves and the world around us.”

“As long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, Christmas is.”

“It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay. ”

“... Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism...”

“We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.”