“It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,”

“Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.”

“One of the joys of being a grandparent is giving your grandchild caffeinated sugary drinks late in the day, and sending them home. Do you have any idea how many years I had to wait for that?”

“It is at least as possible for a Philadelphian to feel the presence of Penn and Franklin as for an Englishman to see the ghosts of Alfred and Becket. Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.”

“You mean one human is good, but a hundred humans is bad?""Exactly. One human is just a person. A hundred humans make a society. And societies have kings, and religions and priests, and all these other things serrin completely fail to understand”

“What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.”