“Oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥtát savitúr váreniyaṃbhárgo devásya dhīmahidhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt”

“If we cannot be happy in spite of our difficulties, what good is our spiritual practice?”

“Great compassion makes a peaceful heart. A peaceful heart makes a peaceful person. A peaceful person makes a peaceful family. A peaceful family makes a peaceful community. A peaceful community makes a peaceful nation. A peaceful nation makes a peaceful world.”

“The social science fear the radical impulse in literary studies, and over the decades, we in the humanities have trivialized the social sciences into their rational expectation straitjackets, not recognizing that, whatever the state of the social sciences in our own institution, strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the humanities in the area studies paradigm are now around.”

“When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.”

“Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single “teacher's” “students,” flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism “to come,” aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of “Little Britain” leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires.”

“Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, “Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.”