“Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be.”

“As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.”

“Truth is for the gods; from our human point of view, it is an ideal, towards which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach.”

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”

“if there is any one subject on which everyone seems to agree, any one point of doctrine to which every political sect subscribes, it's that "economic growth" is the highest goal, our ultimate goal as a country. and not only as a country-as states, as communities, as corporations, as individuals.”

“In no country does the average income give the right picture of how people live but in a country with higher inequality it is likely to be particularly misleading. Given that the US has by far the most unequal distribution of income among the rich countries, we can safely guess that the US per capita income overstates the actual living standards of more of its citizens than in other countries....The much higher crime rate than in Europe or Japan -- in per capita terms, the US has eight times more people in prison than Europe and twelve times more than Japan -- shows that there is a far bigger underclass in the US.”